Lorin Sookool, South Africa

Born in Cape Town, lives and works in Cape Town.

Lorin Sookool is a South African choreographer, performer, and contemporary artist whose practice moves between dance, performance, costume, writing, and artistic research. With a foundation in dance, she approaches improvisation as both an artistic method and a form of political inquiry, investigating how bodies negotiate systems of value, labour, visibility, and control. Her work asks how bodies reorganise themselves when dominant frameworks cease to resonate or begin to collapse.

Drawing on lived experience as a form of knowledge production, Sookool develops intuitive, process-based works that move between improvisation and composition, connecting personal experience to broader socio-political realities. Her practice is deeply informed by the complexities of contemporary South Africa and frequently engages racial, gendered, systemic, and institutionalised violence. Working across theatres, galleries, film, and public space, she transforms everyday gestures into choreographic material and explores movement as a means of sensing, resisting, and imagining otherwise.

Her works include Woza Wenties! (2023–present), an ethnographic solo examining the school, church, and dance classroom as interconnected colonial forces; Prayer Room (2020), a dance film developed through conversations with senior citizens in KwaZulu-Natal around care, faith, isolation, grandmotherhood, and coloured identity politics; TokTokkie (2019), a series of public and private activations exploring surveillance, security, wealth disparity, access, and social visibility; and Cash Cow (2023–present), a duet created with Shibari practitioner Sunga Konji investigating labour, pleasure, spectacle, intersectional feminism, and the politics of creative work.

Sookool’s work has been presented internationally in Mozambique, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom, alongside an extensive performance career with South African and international choreographers and artists. She is a recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance (2023) and the Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography (2021). She is currently a Master of Arts candidate at the University of Cape Town, supported by a scholarship from the Institute for Creative Arts through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her first publication, Dala What You Must: A Manifesto, is forthcoming in Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, Vol. II from the University of Michigan Press in 2026.