Andrea Peña & Artists

Andrea Peña & Artists is a multidisciplinary company that merges the universes of choreography and design. Based in Montreal, Quebec in the territory of Tiohti:áke, the company merges the body and materiality in performative, digital, and sculptural works to create living arts universes. AP&A’s multifaceted practice explores the peripheries of social imaginaries, as futuring hybrid narratives that nurture the collision of different fields, disciplines, and individuals through AP&A’s collaborating artists.

Andrea Peña, born in Bogota, Colombia, created AP&A after a career as performer with Ballet BC and Les Ballets Jazz Montréal, and is now recognized in Canada and internationally for her creations as critical, alternative, and spatial encounters that break with our notions of a sensitive humanity. With a master’s degree in industrial design from Concordia University, Peña’s work imagines cross-disciplinary approaches that challenge the choreographic practice as a source of collective experimentation and knowledge. As a bi-cultural artist, Peña is known for her complex layered systems that engage in deep encounters between the physical body and a highly conceptual research approach.

From Canada, Japan, USA, Germany, Italy, France, Mexico, Greece, Spain, India, and others, Peña’s works are recognized for her inter-artistic rigour that manifests spatio-material experiences that challenge hybrid practices. Andrea is recognized with numerous awards and commissions for her conceptual creations, most recently the Hong Kong International Choreography Award (2018) and the Banff Centre’s Clifford E. Lee Award (2019) given to an emerging Canadian artist in recognition for her highly rigorous creation 6.58: Manifesto, which was selected to open the internationally renowned Tanzmesse in Dusseldorf (2022).  AP&A’s latest large-scale creation, BOGOTA (2023), was the winner of La Biennale di Venezia’s first foreign choreographic co-production.

The company’s most recent works include 6.58: Manifesto (2021), which won the Banff Centre’s Clifford E. Lee Award and opened the 2022 internationally renowned Tanzmesse; and Untitled I (2018) and Untitled I + III (2019), which won the prix Hong Kong International Choreography. AP&A has been presented by the National Arts Centre (2021), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2021), Arsenal Contemporain Art (2016), Usine C (2019), Agora de la Danse (2021), TANZ Bremen (2022), Tanzmesse (2022), Cinars, New Italian Dance Platform (2022), Festival Trajectoires (2022), Theater Freiburg (2021), Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (2020), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2019), Attakkalari India Biennial (2018), MILANoLTRE Festival (2022), Festival Quartiers Danses (2022), Hong Kong International Choreography Festival (2018), Festival Internacional de Danza de la Ciudad de México (2017), PRISMA - Festival de Danza Contemporánea (2016), AADK Spain (2017), and Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture (2016), among others. Andrea’s work has been commissioned by the PHI Centre, Laval Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Edmonton, the 375th Anniversary of Montreal, Pro Arte Danse, École de danse contemporaine de Montréal, Transformation, and Springboard Program.