Student Profile

Tara Brandel
MFA Dramatic Art, 2019

Tara Brandel is an Irish choreographer, contemporary dancer, aerialist, and contact improviser, and has been choreographing extensively since 1990. Her work has been shown in Cork, Dublin, London, Berlin, San Francisco, Seattle, Egypt, Canada, and Australia. 

She trained with Steve Paxton and Kirstie Simpson in Contact Improvisation 1983-86 at Dartington College, England, and has a BA in Dance Theatre from the Laban Centre, London, 1990. Her aerial mentors include Genevieve Mazin, Terry Sendgraff, and Jo Krieter. She has just completed a two-year dance Dance Residency at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, which included a retrospective exhibition of 25 years of her choreography.

Most recently she performed her solo Gawky and Awkward at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, was nominated as part of Best Performance Ensemble at Dublin Fringe 2015, and was commissioned by the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival festival in Cairo to make a site-specific integrated dance piece for their festival. Her short dance film CAR screened at the Contact Dance International Film Festival 2017 in Toronto. She is currently touring her new solo dance theatre show Cappaghglass to Cork Midsummer Festival, Ireland; Ponderosa, Germany; DCAF, Cairo; and Fresh Festival, San Francisco. She is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Croí Glan Integrated Dance Company, based in Cork. 

Dance Theatre Journal writes, “Brandel’s work has a startling raw honesty . . . ambitious and oblique.”

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