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Bio

Niamh O’Loughlin (she/her) is a queer Irish dance artist based in Dundee. Her practice performance, making, and facilitation with a special interest in improvisation, storytelling, and myth as tools for connection and transformation. Trained at the Scottish School of Contemporary Dance, Niamh spans dance theatre for young audiences, sensory theatre, outdoor performance the the occasional miserable work for adult audiences.

Niamh is currently an Associate Artist with Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre. She is a recipient of the Lucy Bowen Inclusive Choreography Award 2026 from Mark Morris Company Group. and Her work has been supported organisations including The Work Room, Dance Ireland, Starcatchers, Citymoves, Hospitalfield, Mull Theatre, Dublin City Council, and The Byre Theatre.

Niamh is currently creating the witch-inspired dance film Spell Body with dance living with Parkinsons, and The King of the Birds, as outdoor duet for family-audiences.

As a choreographer and lead artist, Niamh’s past projects include The Changeling Wife (2021), a solo rooted in Irish folklore and shapeshifting. She was also commissioned by Lyra to create After We Fell (2023) and Learning to Dance in the Rain (2024), and by The Fringe in Schools (2024). Her wider body of work explores myth, landscape, femininity, and transformation through embodied storytelling.

As a performer, Niamh has worked with a range of artists and companies including What Moves You, Hannah Tuuliki, Elizabeth Schilling, and Laura Walker. She has also performed in children’s theatre works such as My Friend Selkie, touring across Scotland.

Deeply committed to accessibility and inclusion, Niamh creates work for a wide spectrum of audiences including PMLD audiences, young children, neurodivergent individuals, and working-class communities. Whether in a theatre, forest, classroom, or online space, her work invites people into shared spaces of listening, aliveness, and transformation.

Photo credit: Brian Hartley

Photo credit: Victoria Begg

Artistic Statement

My work as a queer, female dance artist is rooted in listening.
Listening to the moment, to the body, and to the story that’s ready to be told.
Drawing on folklore, myth, and personal lineage, I create performances that are alive, improvisational, and richly embodied.
I believe in dance as a space of agency where performers bring their full selves, where audiences are invited to feel rather than decode, and where something unknown can emerge.

My practice is deeply interdisciplinary, weaving together live and digital performance, storytelling, movement, and sound.

I am drawn to archetypes and images from myth, figures like the changeling, the selkie, and the witch through which I explore identity, transformation, and survival. These are not static symbols, but dynamic containers for contemporary, lived experience. Through improvisation, I make space for instinct, power, and complexity to rise to the surface.
Accessibility and care are central to how I work. I create dance that invites in a wide spectrum of audiences, including those who are often excluded from theatre, autistic audiences, people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD), and working-class communities.

Collaboration is a key part of this process; I thrive on being challenged and expanded by others; dancers, musicians, designers, and participants across art forms and lived experience.
I’m not interested in perfection or polish. I’m interested in presence. In what pulses through the body when it speaks its own language. In what we learn when we surrender to the unknown.