Jessie Thompson
Jessie Thompson is a Dublin-based dance artist and choreographer originally from Swords. Her practice bridges hip-hop and contemporary dance, working at the intersection of rhythm, music, and live performance across theatre, film, and non-traditional spaces. Jessie works as a choreographer-maker, performer, facilitator, and curator, with a strong focus on physicality and collaboration with space and sound, community engagement, multidisciplinary practice and Live music.
Her choreographic work explores embodiment, extreme physicality, collective energy, and the politics of the female body within male-dominated spaces, often balancing formal rigour with improvisation and live music. Jessie’s live works includes ‘ The Floor is Yours’, CRAWLER, AUTOMATA: A Myth Reawakened, The Floor Is Yours, Leave Us Behind, BENCH, Missing You, Missing Me, and Dance Music for the Apocalypse.
Jessie was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland through the Dance Artist in Residence Award (2025–26), in partnership with Project Arts Centre and Dublin City Council, this work connected over 50 youth members of the Dublin city Council area through dance, 25 professional Irish International dance artists and will reach wide audiences through a curated event presenting at Project arts Centre titled ‘ THE FLOOR IS YOURS’ an the Dance Bursary Award (2025–26). She is a resident Project Artist at Project Arts Centre. In 2025, she undertook a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris after receiving the Romilly Walton Master’s in Performance Award, and has been supported through multiple Arts Council awards including bursary, agility & commission awards and residencies with Dance Ireland, Dance Galway, and Dance Limerick, as well as the Fingal Artist Support Scheme from fingal arts office.
Her critically acclaimed solo CRAWLER, created in collaboration with live musician Jason McNamara, enjoyed a sold-out run at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and was supported by Culture Ireland and DanceBase. Other works include BENCH (commissioned by CoisCéim Dance Theatre and Waterways Ireland; winner of the 2024 Business to Arts Award), Missing You, Missing Me (What Next Festival 2025), and AUTOMATA: A Myth Reawakened, a collaboration with Georgian composer Natalie Beridze commissioned by Light Moves Festival 2025, ‘DANCE MUSIC FOR THE APOLOCYLPSE’ presented in Culture night dublin, The Visual Carlow, and Centre Cultural Irlandais as part of Nuit Blanche.
As a performer, Jessie has worked with leading Irish companies and artists including United Fall, CoisCéim Dance Theatre, Maria Nilsson Waller, and Rosie Stebbing, and has toured internationally throughout Europe, the UK, and China. She has also choreographed and performed in This Solution by Shaun Dunne (Dublin Theatre Festival 2023), with upcoming collaborations including THISISPOPBABY and ANU Productions.
Jessie’s choreographic work for film and music includes collaborations with artists such as Gemma Dunleavy, Damien Dempsey, Denise Chaila, Talos, SOAK, Kynsy, and Bold Love. Her work has been presented at Dublin Dance Festival, What Next Festival, Light Moves Festival, Nuit Blanche Paris, and in numerous community and international contexts.
Jessie is the founder and director of Battle of Zen (est. 2020), Ireland’s leading street dance and experimental battle platform. She was the inaugural Irish winner of Red Bull Dance Your Style (2023) and continues to contribute to the development of the Irish street dance community through curation, mentorship, teaching, and adjudication. Battle of Zen has delivered multiple live editions across Ireland and is currently expanding toward an annual festival model with a strong focus on community engagement and female leadership.
Alongside her artistic practice, Jessie works extensively as a community engagement dance artist, delivering workshops, performances, and education programmes in partnership with organisations including , Foroige, Project Arts Centre, Creative Places Darndale, youth Companies in Limerick and Belfast and Secondary schools across Dublin.