Independent Choreographer and Punchdrunk Associate Director
Maxine is an independent choreographer and director with an MA in choreography from the Laban Centre and is a recipient of the Bonnie Bird Choreography Award. She was Artistic Director of First Person Dance Company from 1996 – 2003 touring works such as Déja Deux, In the Face of a Stranger, Plastic Chill and It’s Only a Game Show. Since 2002 she has been Director and Choreographer for Punchdrunk, with whom she co-directed the multi-award-winning Sleep No More (London, Boston, New York, Shanghai), The Drowned Man, The House Where Winter Lives, The Firebird Ball, Faust, Masque of the Red Death, Tunnel 228, The Duchess of Malfi (an operatic collaboration with English National Opera and Thorsten Rasch) The Yellow Wallpaper. A recent documentary on Punchdrunk’s work Behind the Mask premiered on Sky Arts in January 2023. Most recently, Punchdrunk opened the epic The Burnt City in London.
Work for film and television includes Mari (dir: Georgia Paris), The Third Day – Autumn (Punchdrunk), Brave New World (dir: Owen Harris) and 20:20 Vision (dir: Jake Polonsnky). Work for theatre and opera includes The Cunning Little Vixen (Glyndebourne), Evening at the Talk House (National Theatre) and Electra (Old Vic). In 2022 Maxine premiered the stage and installation work Here Not Here in collaboration with artist Es Devlin and GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. She has also created dance theatre work for The BalletBoyz (UK), The Martha Graham Company (USA) in collaboration with Bobbi Jene Smith, Verve (UK) and Johannes Wieland Company (Germany). In 2019 she created the award-winning site-specific work Sunset (Australian Dance Award) for Strut Dance and the Perth Festival.
Maxine is a regular principal artist at Springboard Dance Montreal, B12 Festival in Berlin and has mentored for the iconic Jacobs Pillow Dance Season. In 2023 Maxine will continue her collaboration with Es Devlin in a large-scale dance installation work – Salamander – commissioned by the Brisbane International Festival and Australasian Dance Collective. Future projects include new work for NDT2 in collaboration with composer Cassie Kinoshi.