Jungeun Kim (J.e.) is an interdisciplinary dance artist, educator and restorative practitioner. Her work focuses on connectedness accentuated by aesthetic simplicity and curiosity, and is often sourced from personal experience and relationality. What sparks her curiosity is how one’s lived experiences manifest in the body and body movements. Her research and practice embraces and integrates many disciplines, nurturing relationships between individuals as well as the social connections within communities while expanding ways of communication. She also explores our relationship to the environment and nature and what this can teach us about our own connectedness.
She is interested in work that is approachable in many different ways for and with others as spectator, participant or collaborator. Her research and creative process is motivated by accessibility: that art, whether it be dance, theater, music and beyond, is for everyone. She works with both mediums of dance and digital media, such as video, moving images and animation to create live performance, participatory events, experimental video and animation works. Her process begins with interdisciplinary approaches by choreographing and mapping assorted images; crafting different pieces and movement sequences together like doing a puzzle without knowing the final image; improvising with various elements and materials such as sound/music, video projections and tangible objects to transform and design the performing space; embracing differences to create a collective story; facilitating events that invite people to build connections.
Her dance and video work has been presented around the U.S., Europe and Asia including Korean Cultural Center, Design Philadelphia, Taubman Museum of Art and Torino Esposizioni. As an educator, she has taught extensively, from a community center for refugees and immigrants, to dance festivals, to institutions of higher education.
She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from American Dance Festival/Hollins University, under direction of Donna Faye Burchfield and Master of Arts in Liberal Studies in Visual and Performing Arts from Hollins University. Additionally, she holds a Graduate Certificate in Restorative Practices at the International Institute for Restorative Practices Graduate School. She collaborates frequently with composer Lucas Brown; together they have presented dozens of works around the world. Jungeun hails from Seoul, South Korea.