Jo Kreiter

Jo Kreiter is a San Francisco-based choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. Through dance she engages imagination, physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. She founded her company, Flyaway Productions, in 1996. Flyaway Productions is an apparatus-based dance company that advances social issues in the public realm and explores the range and power of female physicality. Under Kreiter’s artistic direction, Flyaway creates dances on both architectural and fabricated steel objects, with dancers suspended anywhere from 2 to 100 feet in the air. The company creates a sense of spectacle to make a lasting impression with an audience, striving for the right balance of awe, provocation, and daring. Kreiter’s tools include community collaboration, a masterful use of place, a feminist lens and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity.

Over the past 21 years, she has developed a nationally recognized expertise in creating and presenting site-specific performance work. Since 1996, her company has presented or co-presented numerous large scale works, including the award winning trilogy Niagara Falling (2012), Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane (2014) and Needles to Thread: Dancing Along these Lines in Continuum Alley (2015).

Recent awards include a Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship (2017-2019); the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Creation Grant (2017-2020); and the California Arts Council’s Creative California’s Communities Award (2017-2019).

She is also the founder of GIRLFLY (founded 2006), an award-winning dance and activism program addressing the lack of arts training opportunities and gender-specific social pressures faced by low-income teen girls. She started GIRLFLY because she felt that her generation has failed to create a full state of equity for women and girls, and GIRLFLY is her way of addressing that challenge. Learn more at flyawayproductions.com