Holly Jaycox

Holly Jaycox is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and creator of community. Her work has been presented around the Midwest from Detroit to Minneapolis, from Iowa to Ohio. Practicing in the space between the visual and the somatic, Jaycox collaborates with artists across disciplines including her frequent collaborations with professional sound artist Nathan McWilliams.

 With a specialization in improvisational movement forms, Jaycox teaches and creates work utilizing improvisation as a foundational element, whether the final product is set choreography or presented in an improvisational format. She defines improvisation as choice making in the moment, a process of embodiment that grounds dancers in their own agency.

As a founding member of GLACIER, the Midwest’s regional organization for hosting and promoting Contact Improvisation Dance events, she has taught workshops across the Great Lakes region, serving multiple times as Artistic Director of the annual GLACIER five-day retreat.

As a teacher at Purdue, Jaycox appreciates the diversity of students that she teaches. She teaches students who are studying a wide variety of other disciplines in addition to dance and mentors them to see how their multiple disciplines interact and inform each other. She has a passion for introducing dance to students who have little or no dance background, as well sharing new approaches to dance artistry and training with seasoned performers. She believes that everyone can benefit from increasing their body awareness and their physical confidence, and that dance enhances the richness of our lived embodied experience as humans.

Jaycox received a BAFA in Dance from the University of New Mexico, and an MFA in Choreography and Performance from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She also earned a graduate certificate in Performance Curation from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.