About

  • Photo: Anson Cheng
  • Screensaver Series (2019) – J. Neve Harrington. Photo by Roswitha Chesher
  • In the foreground is a female dancer in a shiny turquoise shirt and light coloured trousers eyes looking up with her arms pulled apart in opposite directions. Behind her are three female dancers with their hands on their waists in the motion of turning. They are in colour coordinated shirts and trousers with long hair loose.
    W.A.Y (re-work / 2021) by Sung Im Her. Photo by Ikin Yum
  • Factual Actual by Florence Peake, at Southwark Park Galleries, London (2023). Photo: Mischa Haller
  • Baa’s Gold 10 by Hetain Patel at The National Gallery (2021). Photo: Anna Arca
  • RITE R&D (2017) by Florence Peake. Photo by Anne Tetzlaff
  • Ways of Being Together (2020) – Jo Fong. Photo by Lucas Chih Peng Kao 高智鵬
  • TiLTING VERTICALITIES by Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, July 2021. Photo: Anne Tetzlaff
  • The Turning Wheel (2022) by Iris Chan and Bettina Fung for Nocturnal Creatures at Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Jeffrey Choy

Iris (she/her) is a London-based dancer, performer, and producer from Hong Kong.

I have been working in the UK dance sector with a wide range of choreographers, artists, and organisations for 15 years in roles traversing producing, performing, teaching, mentoring and facilitating. I perform in galleries, museums, theatre and site-specific contexts as a dancer and performer. Artists I have worked and collaborated with include J. Neve Harrington, Florence Peake, Jo Fong, Sophie Nüzel, Sung Im Her, Hetain Patel, Zadie Xa, Laura Wilson, Ghost & John, Robert Clark, Pablo Bronstein, and Amina Khayyam, amongst others. This has led to me performing at festivals such as EAREYE (Malmö, 2020), Chinese Arts Now (London, 2020), Dance International Glasgow (2019), Art Night (London, 2019), Venice Biennale (2019), Prague Quadrennial (2019), SPILL festival (Ipswich, 2018), Block Universe (London, 2018), and Do Disturb at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2018).

My background is in contemporary dance and classical Indian dance Kathak. I graduated with a BA (Hons) from University of Surrey and an MA from London Contemporary Dance School where I performed and toured internationally with the postgraduate dance company EDge.

Alongside performing, my career in arts management began as administrator at Independent Dance from 2008-2013. Since 2015 I have been a freelance producer and manager, as well as working in management roles with companies such as Luca Silvestrini’s Protein, Candoco Dance Company, and Siobhan Davies Dance. I am currently a freelance producer with the interdisciplinary research project NEUROLIVE, and with Frame Rush, an annual screendance festival curated by MA Screendance students at London Contemporary Dance School. I have also been a trustee at Independent Dance since 2022.

Having worked both within and outside of organisations, I draw from a diverse range of experiences of being insider/outsider across professional environments as well as my own cultural identity as a British Hong Kong-er to inform how I cooperate in, facilitate, and lead projects and teams. I love collaborating, problem solving, team building, and listening/questioning deeply within creative processes. I bring my interests and experience in interdisciplinary collaboration, improvisation, devising, somatic movement practices, and mindfulness into performance making.

In 2023 I embarked on a long-term dream to train as a yoga teacher and graduated from the Daoist Flow Yoga Teacher Training (230-hr RYS) with teachers Jean Hall, Mimi Kuo-Deemer and James Rafael. I now mentor and assist on the teacher training programme led by Jean Hall and James Rafael at Mission in London.