Biography

Emma Sandall is an Australian dance artist, writer, and creative producer working across performance, movement, and interdisciplinary storytelling. She began her career as a classical ballet dancer, performing internationally with Béjart Ballet Lausanne, The Royal Ballet, Scottish Ballet, and West Australian Ballet.

She now creates, directs, and produces original performance works while also writing on dance and contemporary culture. Alongside her creative practice, Emma is an experienced guest teacher of ballet and contemporary practices, working with pre-professional and professional dancers. Her work brings together artistic authorship, dramaturgical thinking, and cultural leadership, with projects developed across Australia, the United States, and Europe.

Her recent solo work An Ambivalent Woman of 37 premiered in Sydney in 2024 and toured internationally later that year.

Emma holds a Graduate Certificate in Arts and Cultural Management (Deakin University) and has additional training in writing for performance and movement-based practice.

Photographer Taylor Phoenix

Photographer Jennifer Morse

Artist Statement

I came to dance wanting to express music — to inhabit roles that carried intensity, desire, and emotion, and to find a way of setting those forces free through the body.

I soon learned that dance is never only expression. It is people and history, visual culture and labour, athleticism and failure, travel, discipline, and ideas. It is a living lineage — shaped by bodies, institutions, aesthetics, and time.

Not long after my performing career began, I also began to write, to create, and to teach. As my practice expanded, my focus shifted: from my own interpretation and body toward broader questions. What can be said with the body? How does it communicate? Why does it endure? Where does it resist language, and where does it demand it?

This is where I sit today — firmly a dancer, and through that foundation a writer, thinker, teacher, and maker. My work lives inside the marvellous, tangled, often contradictory lineage of dance itself: embodied, intellectual, historical, and unfinished.

Areas of Practice

  • Performance and creative producing (dance, theatre, voice)
  • Arts writing and editorial
  • Teaching, workshops, and mentorship

Experience Snapshot

  • 30 + years in professional performance
  • 15+ years producing, directing, and devising original work
  • 15+ years in arts writing (Dance Magazine, Dance Australia, The Australian)

Training

  • Graduate Certificate in Arts and Cultural Management (Deakin University)
  • Tour Producing (PAC Australia)
  • NIDA Screenwriting Short Course (2025)
  • Pilates & Personal Training qualifications
  • BA Dance – Edith Cowan University / WAAPA
  • Professional training: The Royal Ballet School (London), Australian Ballet School (Melbourne)

Resumé [link to PDF]

Work with Emma

Emma collaborates as a producer, dramaturg, creative partner, and teacher.
Get in touch to discuss a project or collaboration.

[→ Contact Emma]

Photographer Tiffany Bessire