Sue Healey
2023 PRESENTER
Sue Healey was the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Australia Council Award for Dance. She is a Sydney-based choreographer, film-maker and installation artist, critically acclaimed for her work in dance and moving image. Experimenting with form and perception, Healey creates performance and film for diverse spaces and contexts: galleries, theatres and screens. She has won national and international awards including 6 Australian Dance Awards and 2 Hong Kong Dance Awards (2021.
Based in Sydney since 2000, Healey has created four major series of works: Niche (2000-04), In Time (2005-08), The Curiosities (2009-12) and ON VIEW (2013-22). These comprise performance, film and installation works. Throughout this period, Healey built a national and international reputation, showing her work in many iconic venues—Sydney Opera House; Victorian Arts Centre; Lincoln Centre, New York; Aichi Arts Centre, Nagoya Japan; West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong; and in the USA, UK and New Zealand. She has an enduring connection with Asia, touring , choreographing and teaching regularly in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her recent ON VIEW series, cine-portraits of dance artists from Asia and Australia, culminated in the large-scale performance installation Panoramic Suite in Sydney and Hong Kong in 2021. Various digital and live iterations from this work have toured to Japan, Hong Kong, Sydney and Adelaide, through 2020 and 2021 despite the impacts of the pandemic.
In 2022 Healey was commissioned by Youth Dance Australia to create 2 films – Alumni and Meeting Place and Blue Mountains Cultural Centre to create Yindyang Bila for indigenous choreographer Jo Clancy for the exhibition Water presence and absence.
Her major performance work for 2022 was the live broadcast performance The Long Walk commissioned by OZASIA Festival in Adelaide 2022 with musician Benjamin Walsh and dancers Kimball Wong, Julian Renlong Wong, Queenie Wu, Tayla Hoadley and Ko Yamada.
Film awards in 2021/22 include
Best Live Capture, Inspired Dance Film Festival Australia (Live Action Relay),
Best Film EATSA Portugal (Lady of the Horizon),
Best Cinematography, Roma Short Film Festival Italy and Japan International Film Festival (Circumstance 2020)
Best Original Music, Seoul Short Film Festival Korea (Circumstance 2020)
Originally from New Zealand, Sue graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts (BA Dance in 1983, MA Choreography in 2000) and became a founding member of Danceworks, Melbourne, choreographing and performing with the company from 1983–88 nationally and internationally. She was Artistic Director of Vis-à-Vis Dance Canberra from 1993-95. She has created many works for Australian companies and as an independent artist. She was awarded an Australia Council Creative Fellowship in 2014 and an Honorary Fellowship of University of Melbourne in 2017.
Her platform paper Capturing the Vanishing: A choreographer and film was published by Currency House in 2019.