Neil Ieremia

Neil Ieremia ONZM is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most accomplished choreographers, creative leaders, and interdisciplinary artists. Of Samoan heritage and raised in Porirua, Ieremia is the founder and artistic director of Black Grace, the internationally celebrated company he established in 1995. Across more than three decades, his practice has redefined contemporary movement in the Pacific, bringing together the physical intensity of dance with the storytelling traditions, rhythms, and embodied knowledge of Moana cultures. 

Renowned for works of extraordinary athleticism, emotional force, and cultural resonance, Ieremia has presented internationally at major institutions and festivals including Jacob’s Pillow, New York’s 42nd Street, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Sharjah Biennial and the Aichi Trienniale. His choreography consistently traverses the personal and collective, exploring ancestry, masculinity, spirituality, and belonging through a distinctly Pacific lens.

Extending beyond choreography, Ieremia’s  visual practice explores what he describes as 'kinetic  paintings’. Works that translate the three-dimensional experience of movement into colour, gesture, and abstraction. Emerging from the spontaneous energy of dance, these paintings act as visual scores: layered compositions in which memory and motion converge. The vivid palettes draw from deeply personal and cultural references, including the floral patterns of his mother’s muʻumuʻu, his father’s aloha shirts, tropical foliage, and the geometric language of traditional tatau. 

Working between choreography and painting, Ieremia’s practice is grounded in storytelling as cultural transmission. Whether through bodies in motion or paint suspended in gesture, his work continues to expand the possibilities of visual and performative language as sites of ancestry, identity, and transformation.