About Amanda

Amanda Acorn (she/her) is an artist and movement facilitator based in Tkaronto. Amanda works to build spaces for care through the intersections of her art practice and her work as a movement guide. She creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for embodied exchange through dance. As a practitioner who has studied across disciplines and movement modalities, she integrates somatic practice, experiential anatomy and imagery into her teaching in Pilates, movement and dance. Amanda weaves sensory play, curiosity, and space to explore unique movement pathways, to cultivate the deepening of awareness and playful discovery.  She teaches improvised systems and contemporary techniques to professional and pre-professional dancers. You can find her teaching Pilates and movement in downtown Toronto at Goodsapce and Fine Tune Pilates in Parkdale.

“I consider myself a holistic practitioner integrating healing modalities within my movement and teaching practice. Parallel to my work as a movement guide, I am also a professional artist, interested in the intersection of my art practice and body-based, therapeutic healing, both as acts of critical care. I’m committed to working within an anti-oppressive, feminist framework and bring a trauma informed lens to movement and working with the body. This is a commitment to ongoing learning and education, not a static state of being. Recent studies include Movement for Trauma L1 with Jane Clapp, Qigong at the Ontario College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the 60hr Golden Chain Kundalini training with Krista Schilter and the Bridging Program at Good Body Feel with Robin Lacambra. I am an MA candidate at York University in Interdisciplinary Studies and entering my 3rd year in the Psychotherapy training program at the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.”

Artist bio below.

Artist bio

Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Tkaronto, Canada. Her practice includes somatic movement, improvisation, writing, and drawing as tools to explore the body as an empathetic and malleable system, wired for attunement. As a dancer, she performed in and collaborated on projects as a company dancer with Dancemakers (2011-2016) and independently with choreographers such as Dana Michel (QC), Isabel Lewis (DE), Lemi Ponifasio (NZ), Andrea Spaziani (CA) and Benjamin Kamino (CA) among others. As a choreographer, she creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for shared, embodied exchange. Her latest project, no place (2022), explores the body in dialogue with the material world through emergent, relational practice and an evolving construction of space and place. She graduated from the Canadian College of Performing Arts (2000) and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre's Professional Training Program (2008) and pursued independent studies in Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and Genoa, Italy. Her solo and group works have included presentations and commissions shared in diverse venues in Toronto including Toronto Dance Theatre, Videofag, The Citadel, Luminato Festival, among others, and across Canada at the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, Workers Arts Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Festival of New Dance in St John’s, Dancer’s Studio West in Calgary, Push Festival and Gold Saucer Studio in Vancouver. She is furthering her study of the dialogue between bodies as an MA candidate at York University and the practice of Gestalt Psychotherapy through the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.