Jo Parkes is a dance artist, facilitator and educator (D/UK). For over two decades, she has worked internationally with co-creative, participatory dance and creates installations, events, performances and videos. She is the founder and artistic director of Mobile Dance e.V. Mobile Dance offers art projects at the intersection of artistic and socio-political concerns. Mobile Dance has created projects in which hundreds of artists in Germany and the UK have been employed in participatory dance.
In 1995, Jo received a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her Master's degree in Choreography at the University of California (UCLA). She earned a degree (First Class) in English Literature and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. In 2019, she won the Honorary Award in the German Dance Prize. Her most recent work, The Walking Projekt, received the IKARUS prize (DE) in 2021. From 2019 - 2021, Jo was on the board of Aktion Tanz: Dance in Education and Society the membership body for community and participatory dance in Germany, where she is now associated artist. From 2020 - 2022, she was visiting professor at Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin (UdK/Ernst Busch).
Jo understands artistic co-creative processes with communities as research into how we live together: a laboratory in which diverse groups of people can investigate issues relevant to them. She is passionate about the potential of collective dance-making to help us imagine alternative ways of being together and creating opportunities for dance artists to expand and challenge their practice in exchange with communities.