Overview
Olive Prince is a movement-based artist, performer, and educator. Her work focuses on corporeal intuition and crafting dance in relationship to unique spaces, installation, objects, costuming, and other art forms. Prince works to create visual imagery for dance to live in. She works with dancers to explore movement originating from deep explorations with literature and poetry, combined with imagistic physical tasks, phrase work, and improvisational parameters. The creative process is frequently a “playground” of experimentation that calls upon risk, vulnerability, and transformation.
She has been commissioned to create dance for many Philadelphia companies and colleges including site-specific work in the Blackwell Library at William Smith College, the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (a mosaic art garden), and the Iron Factory. Prince’s work has been presented at the International Night of the Singapore Youth Festival, Triskelion Arts Center (NYC), the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, the Live Arts Festival (PHL), the International Contemporary Dance Conference, New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Joyce Soho, the CEC Resident Artist Series, the nEW Festival and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival among others. Most recently, her work was featured in an interview on WHYY’s piece “Articulate with Jim Cotter” and she was 2023 recipient of NYS Choreographer’s Initiative Grant where she worked with mentor Jane Comfort.
As a veteran Philadelphia performer she worked as a company member with Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, and Merian Soto for over a decade as well as Silvana Cardell Dance Theater and Group Motion. Her performance credits include touring internationally in Taiwan, Singapore, Germany and Indonesia as well as nationally at the Lincoln Center Outdoors Festival, Battery Park Dance Festival, Joe’s Pub, Interlaken Arts Festival, and throughout Philadelphia. Prince received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University where her solo choreography, video, and sound score was chosen for the American Colleges Dance Festival Association’s National Concert at the Kennedy Center.
Olive Prince worked as an Assistant Teaching Professor in Dance at Drexel University and was the Director of Drexel's Dance Ensemble where she curated, produced, and created 4 performance experiences a year for 60+ dance students. These experiences included Sites of Dance (a walking tour of site specific dance), Dance Films, and traditional dance concerts.