Iréne Hultman Monti

Iréne Hultman Monti (born in Sweden) is a New York–based choreographer, performer, and educator whose work moves fluidly between concert dance, opera, installation and research-led performance. Her research interests include how media, affect and speculative theories influences movement and art production. She was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (1983–1988) and later served as that company’s rehearsal director (2006–2009).
Hultman launched her own company, Iréne Hultman Dance (IHD)1988, to pursue choreography that fused abstraction with theatricality, drawing on her background in both European and American avant-garde traditions. Touring nationally and internationally, she frequently designs situations that combine choreography with visual art contexts, site-specific installations and scenic environments.
Her practice embraces collaboration with performers, composers, visual artists and institutions, and moves easily between theatrical, gallery and civic settings. Her creative curiosity centers on how movement intersects with different environments including the internal landscape.
Hultman cultivated a reputation for embracing complexity, combining improvisation and formal composition, intimacy and spectacle, humor and abstraction. Supported by awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship (1994) and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Award (1995) among others, her company maintained a vibrant presence until 2001. While the formal structure of Iréne Hultman Dance concluded, its spirit continues in Hultman’s ongoing work as choreographer, educator, and collaborator—bridging archives, disciplines, and communities through the medium of movement.
She is a co-founder of interdisciplinary initiatives such as Fire Works and Järna–Brooklyn, projects that explicitly cultivate Swedish–American exchange and cross-disciplinary experiments in performance and visual culture. These collective activities underline her interest in practices that blur categories between choreography, curation, and collaborative production.
Hultman has held teaching and visiting positions at institutions including Yale University (where she is currently in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies), The New School, Ohio State University, and other universities and art academies nationally and internationally including École National Supérieure des Beaux-Art in Paris and The Victoria College of Art in Melbourne. Her university work combines studio practice, and project-based research mentoring. Stylistically, her output resists a single genre label: she moves between abstraction and theatricality, archival restaging and new media experiments, always with an emphasis on how movement communicates affect, knowledge and social relations.
Hultman continues to perform, dramaturge and teach at the intersection of practice and theory.