+ Add
In collaboration with the Reykjavík Dance Festival 2026, we invite all dance enthusiasts; students and professionals to attend lecture series under the heading of Emotional Structures. The event will take place in lecture hall Skriða at the University´s premises at Stakkahlíð 1 on Thursday November 12th from 13 – 15 pm.
IUA Professors Brogan Davison and Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, alongside guest speaker Alessandro Tollari, will reflect on the role of emotions, at both individual and collective levels, and explore how they can shape structures such as a school (The School of Emotions), a festival (Reykjavik Dance Festival) or an artistic collective (Marble Crowd).Drawing the theme of feelings - the theme of this year’s festival - the speakers approach emotions as sites of investigation and will each discuss a project that uses feelings as a means of navigating alternative ways of structuring relationships, educational environments or working conditions.
Brogan Davison is a choreographer and performance maker from the UK. She met her long-term artistic collaborator, Pétur Ármannsson, in Iceland in 2010, and their first work, Dance for Me, propelled them onto the international performance scene. After more than a decade of making performance works together, they expanded their artistic practice into curation, becoming Artistic Directors of Reykjavík Dance Festival in 2021. That same year,Brogan became an Associate Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts. She is currently a Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts and Programme Director of the MA in Theatre and Performance.
Katrín Gunnarsdóttir works as a choreographer, dancer, researcher and teacher. She holds a BA degree in dance and choreography from ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL) as well as an M.Sc in Health Economics and a diploma in Financial Economics from the University of Iceland. As well as creating her own choreographic work, Katrín is a member of Marble Crowd, a Reykjavik-based collective of artists. She is on the board of The National Theatre of Iceland and served as chair of the Nordic Forum for Dance Research between 2024-2026. Katrín is currently a Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts and Programme Director of the BA in Contemporary Dance Practices.
Alessandro Tollari is a PhD candidate at the Iuav University of Venice and a humanities teacher in high school in his hometown Turin. His project “Otherworldly Schools. Worlding between performing arts and radical pedagogies”is a Research-Creation that - through studies on utopia, critical fabulation, and fictional speculation - moves a critique to the school institution in the contemporary European context to activate possibilities of transformation of the educational imaginary.
He is currently a consultant for the educational projects of Lavanderia a Vapore (Fondazione Piemonte dal Vivo, Turin), as well as a cultural advisor and dramaturg for various companies on the national performing arts scene. In 2025 he is a participant in the Independent Program of the Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid) and a visiting student at the Culture Commons Quest Office of the University of Antwerp. He is editor for Roots & Routes - research on visual cultures, and adjunct professor of Artistic Languages Pedagogy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.