Oona Doherty

Oona Doherty, born in London in 1986, is an Irish dancer, choreographer, and artist from Belfast, whose dance style is known for its expressive power. She explores, in particular, the codes of masculine stereotypes in the suburbs of Belfast.

Doherty studied at the London Contemporary Dance School, the University of Ulster, and the LABAN Conservatory in London. She has worked with companies such as United Fall: Emma Martin (Spain), TRASH (Netherlands), and Abattoir Fermé (Belgium). She has been touring her own choreographies since 2014 and has been an artist at the Metropolitan Art Center in Belfast since 2016.

In her shows and installations, Oona Doherty uses suburban slang to reproduce, remix, and choreograph it. She roams the streets of Belfast in search of broken masculinities to transcribe them into her art.

Committed to transmission, her work, strongly inspired by the world of cinema, plays with the barrier between the audience and the stage. Her work is physical theater and takes a sharp look at society. Based in Marseille since 2023, she has adapted her solo piece “Lazarus,” a visceral work between social dance and physical theater, for 11 dancers from the Ballet National de Marseille, that was part of ROOMMATES program.

She is currently an associate artist at the Pavillon Noir.