Pictured above: (L to R) Dancers Suzette Sagisi, Tegan Schwab-Alavai and Belinda He in Hope Mohr’s “Horizon Stanzas.” Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Above: Hope Mohr, courtesy of the artist.
Hope Mohr (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, visual art, and language. Her work in dance, drawing, and fabric explores embodiment, feminism, gender, and queerness. For over thirty years, she has made multidisciplinary performance that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that ride just underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). She makes performance not only in theatrical contexts, but also extensively in museums and galleries, including at 18th Street Arts Center (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), and in the Bay Area at SFMOMA, ICA San Francisco, 836M Gallery, Mills Art Museum, Gallery Wendi Norris, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Her work has been presented at performance venues throughout the U.S. including: Movement Research at Judson Church (NYC), Highways Performance Space (LA), Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), and in the Bay Area at ODC Theater, Counterpulse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco International Arts Festival, West Wave Festival, Montalvo Arts Center, and S.F. VA Hospital’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation.
As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, and Margaret Jenkins and freelanced with Liz Gerring, Douglas Dunn, Trajal Herrell, Della Davidson, and Pat Catterson.
Hope teaches contemporary dance technique, creative movement, movement for actors, and cross-disciplinary practice. She teaches “Bodies in Practice & Performance” at California College of the Arts. She has taught dance and movement at PARTS (Brussels), The Place (London), Trisha Brown Dance Studio, ODC, Stanford University, Lines Ballet BFA Program, American Conservatory Theater MFA program, Peabody Conservatory, UCLA, and Shawl-Anderson, among others.
In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance (HMD). In 2010, she founded HMD's presenting program, The Bridge Project, which she ran for ten years, curating cutting-edge programs that brought artists together across difference. In 2020, she co-stewarded the organization’s transition to a model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. In 2023, Hope transitioned out of Co-Directorship; she now works as an independent artist.
Her book, Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance, was published by the National Center for Choreography in 2020.
ARTIST RESIDENCIES
Dogpatch Collective (2023)
Montalvo Arts Center (2020-2023)
Zaccho Dance Theater (2023)
Bridge Live Arts (2023) (Affiliated Artist)
836M Gallery (2022)
National Center for Choreography (2019)
Petronio Residency Center (2018)
Stanford Arts Institute (2016)
Bethany Arts Center (2019)
ODC Theater (2012-15)
Montalvo Arts Center (2010)
Interdisciplinary Center for Art, Nature and Dance (2005)
AWARDS & HONORS
Winner, Isadora Duncan Dance Award, Outstanding Choreography (2020)
Nominated for the Herb Alpert Award (2019)
Open rehearsals at SFMOMA as part of painter Liam Everett's SECA Award exhibit (2017)
YBCA Fellow (2016)
Named to the YBCA 100, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' annual nationwide list of artists posing important questions about contemporary culture (2015)
Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr as one of the “women leaders” in the dance field (2014)
Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (“CHIME”), a program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, with mentor Molissa Fenley (2009)
CHIME Across Borders (2014) with mentor Dana Reitz
Assisted Lucinda Childs on Dr. Atomic for S.F. Opera (2005)
Nominated, with Diane Madden, for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for the Reconstruction of Trisha Brown's Locus (2016)
Mohr and poet Brenda Hillman were nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for their collaboration on Far From Perfect (2010)
ADVOCACY
Passionate about both social justice and dance, Mohr earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Columbia Human Rights Fellow. Currently, as a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center, she provides legal support to artists, activists, and mission-driven organizations. For information about her law practice, visit movementlaw.net.