Swiss dancer Fabrice Mazliah has been working as a choreographer for over 20 years. His choreographies and performance installations explore processes of composing embodied thoughts and actions, including poetically reinventing the relationships between our environment, its objects, its atmospheres, language, and our bodies.


Born in Geneva in 1972, Fabrice Mazliah studied dance at the Geneva School of Dance, Brigitte Matteuzzi School, Rudra Béjart School in Lausanne, and The National School of Dance in Athens. He joined Nederlands Dans Theater in 1994. Mazliah was for nearly two decades a member of Ballett Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company (1997–2015), directed by choreographer William Forsythe; there Mazliah cultivated his vision of choreographic collaboration and artistic research. He founded MAMAZA collective with Ioannis Mandafounis and May Zahry (2010–2014), HOOD ensemble at PACT Zollverein (2016–2018), the production platform Work of Act (2018), and recently a Basel based production platform called Fabulous Things (2024).


Over the years, he developed a large body of works created alone and/or in collaboration with other artists. Pieces include: Remote versions (2003) with the chekroun / mazliah / san martin collective, ZERO (2010) and Cover Up (2011) with the collective MAMAZA, PAD (2007) and Eifo Efi (2013) with Ioannis Mandafounis, In Act and Thought (2015) for the closing of the Forsythe Company, Telling Stories, a version for three (2021) Sheela na Gig (2021) for the Lyon Opera Ballet. In 2018, he began The Manufactured Series, composed so far of six Duets, each between a human body and a non-human body. Embodying Bodies (2023), created for 6 dancers further explores human and other-than-human entanglements through the Biological concept of the Symbiotic Holobiont, The Ends of Things, The Things of Ends 2024, for the dance company of Theater Basel, the work delves into the beauty of ends both in dance repertory and in recent history. His most recent work, SHEELA (2024), an adaptation of (Sheela na Gig) with six female performers that focusses entirely on their voices, their joint presence and the potential community that they unleash.


Mazliah’s work has been produced and shown internationally, including at the German Tanzplattform; the Swiss Dance Days; PACT Zollverein, Essen; Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main; DeSingel Theater, Antwerp; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Lyon Opera Ballet; Seoul International Dance Festival; Kyoto Expreiment; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2024 Mazliah is artist in residence at the Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm and at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. He lives in Basel (CH) and Frankfurt am Main (DE).