Murielle Elizéon collaborates with Tipperary Dance on various projects involving professional dancers and community members. She curated the In and Between event at Tipperary Dance Festival 2026. She also facilitated the 2024 and first edition of SPLASH Lab at Tipperary Dance Festival.
Following an initial encounter at the M.E.R.C.I. International laboratory encounter by Cie Marie Lenfant in 2022, Murielle and Tipperary Dance artistic director Alexandre Iseli have established a very rich space for discussion and studio research; a discussion that spans from the politics of bodies in society, to somatic practices, dance improvisations and all the way into the impact of body politics on artistic direction and project management.
Murielle Elizéon is a French-American choreographer, performer, embodied dramaturg, facilitator and teaching artist. She was born and raised in an Italo-Africano-Indian French family in a distressed neighbourhood of Nice, South of France. Informed by her own lived experience, Murielle understood from an early age the transformative power of embodied listening and moving practices to incite radical imagination and resilience. She studied Italian Literature and Dance Aesthetics while completing her contemporary dance training in Nice and Paris, France, and began her professional dance career in 1995. Additionally, she completed a DanceAbility Teacher certification with Alito Alessi at Impulztanz in Vienna, Austria, in 2010, studied Argentine tango in Argentina and Germany for 15 years, finished her yoga teacher training in the US in 2015, and has practiced Qi Gong and meditation for 20 years. She is a certified practitioner in a Somatic modality called Focusing and is currently training in generative somatics and NVC (non-violent communication).
For the last 30 years, Murielle has collaborated and performed with various choreographers and directors across Europe and the US, such as Palle Granhoj, Bob Wilson, Thomas Lebrun, Joachim Schlomer, Eun-Me Ahn, Okwui Okpokwasili, Alexandre Iseli, as well as sharing her own artistic projects with Institutions and Festivals in Ireland, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Denmark, and the U.S. She has taught contemporary dance professional training and workshops in Denmark, Germany and the US.
Murielle uses her unique experience of otherness as a biracial, Black, immigrant artist to build somatic experiences for/with collaborators and audiences. She invites them to inhabit the spaces between each other, and to pause, notice, acknowledge, and create the conditions to shift culture – through witnessing and being witnessed, through moving and being moved, through listening and through collective imagination.
Murielle’s work invests in the connection between body and place, reclaiming the place of the individual, communal, and institutional body as a necessary, central part of radical imagination and the place of practice to inhabit it. She has learned from and collaborated with Val Hanson, executive director of DSC (Dispute Settlement Center in NC, USA), around restorative practices, community practices and creating innovative formats in immersive performances. In 2014, Murielle moved to the U.S. and co-founded Culture Mill, a Performing Arts Laboratory in Saxapahaw, NC, along with artistic partner Tommy Noonan.
Culture Mill serves as both a vehicle to support the creation and touring of Tommy and Murielle’s artistic works and a container to foster a creative and inclusive ecosystem through artist residencies, community-centered initiatives, and groundbreaking immersive artworks from local, national, and international artists. Culture Mill has won regional awards and has been commissioned by the NC Museum of Art, American Dance Festival, Carolina Performing Arts, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Wilson Center and NC State LIVE. During that time, Murielle was also 2 times finalist for the National Dance Project Award and was awarded a 2025 Dance/USA fellowship.
