Dr Kyra Norman

Kyra Norman is a choreographer and researcher working in dance, theatre and film. She approaches her work with an expansive sense of choreographic possibility, and a commitment to bringing dance into conversation with the world around us. Alongside her work as a lecturer in Dance & Choreography at Falmouth, Kyra has an ongoing artistic practice, working as a performer, choreographer and writer, and as a project manager for interdisciplinary arts events.  

Following early experiences as a performer in large-scale outdoor and site-specific shows with Cheshire Dance Workshop, and work as a set builder for Manchester Youth Theatre, Kyra went on to train at Laban, where she specialised in choreography, lighting and video, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Dance Theatre in 1998. For the next 10 years, she worked extensively as a performer, choreographer and creative producer. Since 2008, she has focused on research, teaching and writing, contributing to books, journals and conferences on a range of subjects including interdisciplinary collaboration, dance on screen, site-based performance making and the creative re-use of archives, working with and for artists and organisations including Goat Island, Dance South West, moves dance on screen festival, Chisenhale Dance Space, OpenSource Videodance, Arnolfini and Siobhan Davies Studios/ Independent Dance.  

From 2005 to 2008, Kyra led The Light Fantastic (TLF), an artist-driven curatorial platform presenting dance on screen and in the flesh: the rough, the smooth, the thoughtful, the frivolous, the raw and the cooked, based at "that notorious underground enclave" the Cube Microplex, Bristol, UK. Over three years, TLF worked with over 100 artists to develop and share their work, and this experience of supporting artists to realise their visions informs Kyra’s teaching and supervision of students’ work. Through her involvement with arts collectives such as the Cube Microplex, Albany Artists and DanceSpace Bristol, and artist-led training programmes including the Goat Island Summer School and Ponderosa, Kyra has many years’ experience of creating collaborative contexts that welcome and support artists and audiences to get together and dare to do and see things differently.   

Kyra has worked in Higher Education since 2006: at Dartington College of Arts, the University of Bristol and the University of Brighton, amongst others. From 2009 to 2011, she was administrator for the Screendance Network, an AHRC-funded research network promoting international discourse on and dissemination of screendance practice: this led to the founding of the International Journal of Screendance, for which she is on the Editorial Board. Kyra joined the Dance & Choreography team at Falmouth University in 2015, where she teaches across theoretical and practical modules, supervises students’ independent projects and dissertations, and encourages students to follow their own, particular curiosity as to what, and where, dance can be.