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Jonathan Osborn is a Toronto-based artist, educator, and researcher whose artistic and academic interests include human-animal relations, choreographic transmission, practice as research, museum studies, and representations of life within film, animation, and video games. A graduate of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s professional training program, Jonathan also studied at the Merce Cunningham Studio and Jacob’s Pillow and performed for Canadian artists including Dancetheatre David Earle and Bill James. As a choreographer, Jonathan focuses on the solo form and his work has received support from municipal, provincial, national  and international funding bodies including the TAC, OAC, CCA, and DAAD. His most recent works ARK (2017), ARCHE (2018), GARDEN (2018), and FOSSIL (2019), XENOMORPHIA (2020), One Hundred Years  of Cinematic Solitude in 300 Moving Pieces (2022), and Animating Gestures (forthcoming) have been based on human and nonhuman bodies staged within different cultural forums including zoos, gardens, museums and archives. Jonathan serves as contract faculty at  York University and holds a PhD in Dance Studies, an MA in Dance, and a BA in English Literature. His SSHRC funded research Between Species: Choreographing Human and Animal Bodies focused on kinaesthetic human-animal relations in a variety of settings and contexts and was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize. As an educator Jonathan focusses on student-centred learning that encourages student awareness, skill acquisition, and reflection rather than replicability or dogma and his academic work has been published in journals and collected editions including Animals in Narrative Film and Television (2022)Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (2019),Narrative in Performance (2018) and PUBLIC (2023).   Jonathan is currently working on a manuscript about choreographic creation, and creating a new dance work based on the moving bodies in digital and analog animation.

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