About
Eileen is an artist who works with a variety of media in performance or installation settings. What she creates is predominantly influenced by her background as a choreographer and dancer. Her work crosses disciplines of dance making, video art, installation, and performance art. It is informed by practices of realtime composition/ improvisation, live art, somatically-driven investigations and collaborative tendencies.
Her artistic research often explores a threshold moment before gesture manifests itself in the material world. Consciousness, the metaphysical, and radically shifting states of body/mind are recurring themes of inquiry.
Eileen's work has been shown internationally in festivals, museums and theaters including the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona, Center for Contemporary Art in Cádiz, CaDance Festival in Den Haag, Side Step Festival in Helsinki, the Bimhuis and Frascati theaters in Amsterdam and the Asahi Art Square in Tokyo. She was a founding member of Magpie Music Dance Company in Holland, an interdisciplinary company specializing in real-time composing, which toured internationally for 13 years.
Nationally, she has been producing work in museum and gallery settings as well as urban sites, theaters, and festivals such as the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Phoenix Icehouse, and the Arizona State University Art Museum, among others.
Eileen’s work and interdisciplinary collaborations have been supported by several National Dutch Arts Commissions, the Japan Foundation, the Netherlands Embassy in Japan, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and others.
She performed and presented choreographies in the Bay Area, London, and Germany before settling in the Netherlands. After 24 years of living and working in Europe, Eileen relocated back to the U.S. in 2009.
Her life, artistic practice, and research are now based in Arizona where she is currently a Clinical Professor in the School of Film, Dance within the Herberger institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University.
Collaborations
She is inspired by the collaborative process in creation and performance, often joining forces with international dance, music and visual artists such as, Mia Lawrence, Lily Kiara, Sher Doruff, Isabelle Vigier, Alison Isadora, Katie Duck, Julyen Hamilton, Katrina Brown, Marion Tränkle, Michael Vatcher, Michael Moore, Monica Page, Masako Kitaura, Michael Schumacher, Maarten Altena Ensemble, Bik Bent Braam, Magpie Music Dance Company, and others.
In the U.S. she has created work with Eden McNutt, Grisha Coleman, Sam Pilafian, Janice Pittsley, Jessica Rajko, Mary Fitzgerald, and Jen Urso.
Video
As a video artist, Eileen has created work for artistic, educational, and commercial contexts. Currently, she is experimenting with abstract video films and installations. They are choreographies with light, space, movement and body (or no-body).
Since 1991 her fascination with video and its potentialities for intimacy and sensual impact have inspired her to further investigate its power to communicate, like dance, on the non-verbal and subconscious level.
Eileen has also made films, documentations and promotional videos, and multimedia projects for various art related works, commercial pilots and creative research demos in the Netherlands such as the AXA insurance company, Waag-Society for Old and New Media, The Coaching Project - Lectoraat Theaterschool Amsterdam, and others.
Teaching & Coaching
Committed to education and the development of individual expression, Eileen has been teaching (dance composition, technique, improvisation, multimedia and video/dance) in conservatories and independent dance institutions throughout Europe and Japan. Since 2009, her work as a teaching artist has continued to the present within the School of Film, Dance, and Theatre at Arizona State University in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts.
From 1989-2009 she was on the faculty of the Choreography Department (School for New Dance Development) and taught regularly in the departments of National Ballet, Modern, Jazz, and Teachers departments at the Amsterdam School for the Arts (Dance) in the Netherlands. Within the Masters in Choreography division, she was a guest teacher (body/video/multimedia) and artistic mentor for many student projects. Her independent coaching projects and artistic advice to professionals in dance, theater, new media, and video have been in demand throughout her time in Europe.
Education
Next to her own artistic research, she has diplomas and certificates in Content Editing (from the Media Akademie in Hilversum) and Multimedia Producer (from the SAE Multimedia Dept. in Amsterdam).
Eileen is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. She completed a three year training course with Tessa Marwick and Paul Versteeg of the Alexander Technique Centrum in Amsterdam in 2009. She is a member of the American Society for the Alexander Technique and formerly a member of the Nederlandse Vereniging van Leraren in de Alexander Techniek.
In 1986 she received a B.F.A. with honors in Dance/Drama from the University California of Berkeley (directed by David and Marni Wood); she continued her studies in dance in California and NYC with Bella Lewitsky, Margie Jenkins, Mel Wong, Joe Goode, Beth Harris, Yen Lu Wong, Ellen Bromberg, Ruth Currier, Milton Meyers, Ernie Pagnano, among others.
In 2017, Eileen completed an MFA degree in Interdisciplinary Arts: Choreography & Visual Arts from Wilson College, Chambersburg, PA.