Karen Høybakk Mikalsen is a dancer, artist, choreographer, teacher and community builder based in Oslo, Norway. She has been deeply invested in improvisation, composition, somatic practices, group work and contact improvisation since the late 1990’s. She did her dance studies in Oslo, Stockholm, Salzburg and New York, and she sees her 9 years of travelling abroad and the concept of workshopping as a great part of her artistic foundation and lineage. In 2007 she met Lower Left and Ensemble Thinking in New York and has since then dived into ET and research on collective work. Back in Oslo she built a community around improvisation and movement practices through her company Living Movement and ImproLAB/Improfestivalen, now PRAXISfestivalen. She was a founding member of PRAXIS Oslo – an arena for artistic sharing and development around dance and performance practices from 2013-19, and Mind the Gap – a process-based performance venue (inspired by Judson Church) from 2010. From 2015-17 Karen was the recipient of a 3 years artistic work grant from the National Arts Grants of Norway, and from 2018-22 Karen was part of the Nordic Network “Lonely Riders” (SE, FI, IS, NO) – an artistic community project about loneliness and togetherness with refugees and immigrants.
Throughout the last 20 years she has been teaching extensively and developed practices and research around performance and community work. She takes part of various artistic collaborative constellations (such as music, theater and narrative art). Currently she teaches movement for acting as an associate professor at The Teater Department of the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo.
http://www.livingmovement.no/karen-hoslashybakk-mikalsen.html