BIOGRAPHY
Yoon-Joo Jee is a multidisciplinary artist who bridges cinematic storytelling, embodied movement and participatory design to create work that is visceral, poetic and rooted in human connection.
Working across film, live performance and installation, she crafts experiences that invite audiences not only to witness, but to feel, reflect and transform. Her work often draws on elemental forces in nature - fire, water, earth, wind - as mirrors for human emotion and catalysts for healing. Through movement, ritual and immersive experiences, she explores themes of identity, emotional liberation, social conditioning and collective renewal. With a background in contemporary dance, she uses movement as a tool for reclaiming voice, agency and emotional truth, creating expressive physical languages through deeply collaborative and inclusive processes with professional artists, students and community participants alike.
Yoon-Joo is also a multi award-winning creative director whose work has been recognised internationally, including awards at Cannes Film Festival and BAFTA-qualifying festivals. She is an Associate Artist at the University of Nottingham, Artist in Residence with IJAD Dance Company, and Entrepreneur in Residence at City St George’s, University of London. Her work has been commissioned by institutions such as UNESCO, Google.org, Brighton Dome, Goethe Institute, ChangeNOW, Open Society Foundations and Riverside Studios, among others. She has been recognised as an ASPEN Fellow, a Yunus & Youth Fellow, and one of the Top 100 Women by Euclid Network.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
I am led by movement, beauty, and the pursuit of what heightens the senses - those electric moments that open us to awe. My work is an invitation to feel deeply, to return to our aliveness and Nature, and to reconnect with what unites us: our bodies, our emotions, our shared humanity and the natural world.
Shaped by my journey as a dual-heritage immigrant who has lived in 7 countries and engaged with countless cultures, I grew up between social classes, between languages, between worlds. These experiences have instilled in me a fascination with difference and a lifelong pursuit of the threads of unity that lie beneath it. When I ask myself, “Who am I?”, the answer is not fixed, it is layered and shifting, like a constellation made of stories, sensations, and encounters.
I work across disciplines to create holistic, sensory experiences ; art that speaks to the eyes, the skin, and the spirit. Film offers the lens ; movement gives form to emotion and expression ; immersive space opens us to presence and connection. I want each of my creations to leave a trace: a subtle but lasting “before and after.”
At the heart of my practice is a belief in creativity as a form of healing and transcendence. In a world driven by urgency and fragmentation, I seek to build spaces of shared presence, where separateness dissolves and we reconnect with something whole and bigger than us. By awakening our capacity to imagine, feel, be embodied and creative, I believe that we can collectively shape a more sustainable, natural and desirable future.