NiNi Dongnier, Inner Mongolia-born and New York–based, is a choreographer and artist working across choreographic performance, moving image, and painting. She records and choreographs moments that hold intuitive truth and romance. Through movement and tactile materials that extend the body—garments, fur, oil paint, and technological interventions, Dongnier delves into questions about form, faith, constancy, migration, and the experience of life. Her work draws on the daily and memory, nomadic roots and philosophies, Tibetan Buddhism, rigorous training in Mongolian and Chinese dance, early postmodern dance legacies, painters, and art history.
The recurring questions in her work include: the authenticity of movement and paint as pre-linguistic media; the multiplicity of meaning in a single gesture, both personal and universal; the idea of “every motion is a ritual” and “performative landscape;” and a choreographic inquiry: what is the connection among her mastery of Inner Mongolian dance, her engagement with the pedestrian vocabulary of postmodern dance, and the body-time views in Tibetan Buddhism. What new relations and meaning can be created?
She participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, holds an MFA from New York University, and a BFA from Beijing Dance Academy. Her work has been presented at The Watermill Center, New York Live Arts, Movement Research, Mana Contemporary, Aranya Art Center, G Museum, and Shanghai International Dance Center Theater, among others. She has been an artist in residence at La MaMa | CultureHub, Monira Foundation, Media Art Xploration, and Jacob’s Pillow, and is currently a fellow at Initial Research.
