Marie Gourdain is a French choreographer, scenographer and visual artist whose artistic activities have mainly been developed in Prague since 2010, though she also works on various projects more widely in Europe. Her work merges her formation in the visual arts with contemporary dance, drawing on the elements of graphic and sculptural composition (lines and shapes, form, proportion, space, scale, repetition and rhythm) and the detailed analysis of move‐ ment. The result is a complex choreographic work that represents a meeting point between a very visual, shaped and focused approach to the body, a blend of different forms of expression and corporal presence, and comprehensive research into the manipulation of stage props and the use of constructions on stage, while also leaving broad scope for intuition, improvisation and humor. 

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Marie studied animated cinema at ENSAD Paris (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) and the VŠUP in Prague. She received the Frédéric de Carfort Prize (2011) and the ENSAD Sculpture Prize (2009) for her work in sculpture. 

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In the Czech Republic, from 2010 to 2014 she worked in the field of animation cinema before returning to the theatre and dance. As a set designer, she has worked for many choreographers, such as Karine Ponties (2017), Rita Gobi (2018), Andrea Miltnerová, Barbora Látalová, Zdenka Svíteková (2016), Lucia Kašiarová (2014), and on Site Specific projects for the KorresponDance festival (Dominique Boivin, Jean Gaudin, Pierre Nadaud, 2014–2018). 

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In parallel, in 2015 she joined the French‐Czech physical theatre and dance collective tYhle and began her choreographic work. Today Marie has five pieces in the collec‐ tive’s repertoire: UN (2016), LEGOrytmus (2017), Medúza (2018), Mu-‐Tation (2021) and Icarus (2021). 

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In 2020– 2021 her work was supported by Studio ALTA, a platform for contemporary dance in Prague from which the tYhle collective was the Ambassador (associated artists), and by the Tanec Praha organisation. 

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In 2020 Marie received the first International Caroline‐Neuber‐Scholarship awarded by the City of Leipzig. In 2020 Marie also attended a training course for choreo‐ graphers called Édition Spéciale #4 at the National Centre for Dance (CN D) in Paris. Following which in the beginning of 2021 she created a new company in France called Matière Mobile. 

In 2022 she created her sixth piece in collaboration with Felix Baumann, produced between France, Germany and The Czech republic.