Wayne McGregor

Born in 1970, Wayne McGregor CBE is a multi award winning British choreographer and director, internationally renowned for trailblazing innovations in performance that have radically redefined dance in the modern era. Driven by an insatiable curiosity about movement and its creative potentials, his experiments have led him into collaborative dialogue with an array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines, and technological interventions. The startling and multi-dimensional works resulting from these interactions have ensured McGregor’s position at the cutting edge of contemporary arts for over two decades.

In 1992 McGregor founded Random Dance, which has grown into Studio Wayne McGregor to encompass his extensive creative output in fields both beyond, and in dialogue with dance. Company Wayne McGregor, his ensemble of highly skilled dancers, was the original instrument through which McGregor evolved his distinctive visual style, revealing the movement possibilities of the body in ever more precise degrees of articulation. McGregor has made over thirty works for the company and today it continues to be his laboratory for ambitious and experimental new choreography, touring his work across the UK and around the world. Company Wayne McGregor is Resident Company at Sadler’s Wells, London.

Since 2006 McGregor has been Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet, the first choreographer from a contemporary dance background to be invited into the role. Here his productions are acclaimed for their daring reconfiguring of classical language. He has made 15 works for The Royal Ballet, from Chroma (2006) set to music by The White Stripes and Joby Talbot and winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, to Woolf Works (2015), an “exhilarating and ravishingly expressive” (Guardian) full length ballet based on the life and writings of Virginia Woolf.

McGregor is regularly commissioned to make new work by the most important ballet companies in the world. His work has also been re-staged and performed by more than two dozen companies including Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. He is in demand as a choreographer for theatre, opera, film (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Warner Brothers’ Tarzan), music videos (Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers), fashion shows (Gareth Pugh at New York Fashion Week 2014), and TV (Brit Awards opening performance 2016, Paloma Faith’s Brit Awards performance 2015). Some of the long list of artists who have partnered with McGregor through more than twenty years of collaborative multi-disciplinary work include John Tavener, Audrey Niffenegger, Jamie xx, Max Richter, Olafur Eliasson, Lucy Carter, Ben Frost, Thom Yorke, Mark Wallinger, Random International, Jon Hopkins, John Pawson and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Wayne McGregor is Professor of Choreography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and has an Honorary Doctor of Science from Plymouth University. He is part of the Circle of Cultural Fellows at King’s College London. He is Vice President of the Roundhouse, a Trustee of Aerowaves, and Patron of The Place and the Lisa Ullman Travel Scholarship.

McGregor’s work has earned him a multitude of awards including three Critics’ Circle Awards, two Time Out Awards, two South Bank Show Awards, two Olivier Awards, a prix Benois de la Danse and a Critics’ Prize at the Golden Mask Awards. In 2011 McGregor was awarded a CBE for Services to Dance.