Amrita Hepi

Amrita Hepi (b. 1989, Townsville of Bundjulung/Ngapuhi territories) is an award winning artist. Her current practice is concerned with dance as social function performed within galleries, performance spaces, video art, and digital technologies. She engages in forms of historical fiction and hybridity —especially those that arise under empire— to investigate the bodies relationship to personal histories and archive. Amrita is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

In 2020/2018, she was the recipient of the People’s Choice Award for the Keir Choreographic Award for RINSE and won FBI Radio’s Best Artist. In 2020/2021, she was commissioned to make work by Kaldor public art projects, Serpentine Galleries UK, South East Dance Brighton UK, ACCA (AustralianCentre for Contemporary Art), Gertrude Contemporary, and Art Gallery of NSW. In all of these commissions she demonstrated a rigorous ability to bring uncanny choreographic and performative thinking into making. This has included with chat bots/A.I programmed as a socratic yet poetic questionnaires that offer a dancing response, a never ending text script with iphones, as well as works created in the theatre, such as RINSE. These works are continuing to be programmed in dance venues and in galleries around the country.

She is a Gertrude Contemporary studio artist in residence (2020 – 2022) and is on the Board of Directors for RISING festival and Lucy Guerin Inc. She is also a lecturer in Dance and Visual Art (sculpture/performance) at the Victorian College of Art. In 2019, she was a commissioned artist for The National: New Australian Art 2019 and the recipient of the Dance Web scholarship to be mentored by Anne Juren, Mette Ingvarsten and Annie Dorsen. In 2018, she was again the recipient of the People’s Choice Award for the Keir Choreographic for A CALTEX SPECTRUM and was also named one of Forbes Asia 30 under 30.

Amrita trained at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey NYC. Since 2013, she has worked with leading Australian dance companies and choreographers such as Marrugeku, Force Majeure, The Western Australian Indigenous Dance company (Ochres) Melanie Lane, Bhenji Ra, and Victoria Chiu. She has also been an artist-in-residence at Banff Centre for the Arts Canada, ACE OPEN South Australia, PACT Sydney. As artist with a broad following and reach, Amrita’s work has taken various forms (film, performance, sculpture, text, lecture, participatory installation), but always begins with the body as a point of archive, memory, dance, and resistance.

Amrita Hepi, 2023