Karen Høybakk Mikalsen is a dancer, artist, mover, choreographer, teacher and community builder based in Oslo, Norway. She has been deeply invested in improvisation, composition, group work and contact improvisation since the late 1990’s and traveled and lived abroad for 9 years. She did her dance studies in Oslo, Stockholm, Salzburg and New York and sees traveling as part of her artistic lineage. She met Lower Left and Ensemble Thinking in New York in 2007 and has since then dived into research on collective work and built a community around improvisation in Oslo through ImproLAB and Improfestivalen, now PRAXISfestivalen. She is also a founding member of PRAXIS Oslo – an arena for artistic sharing for performing artists. Karen runs her own company Living Movement, she has presented her work in Norway and the Nordic countries, is active in various artistic collaborative constellations (such as music, theater and narrative art), and she choreographs for others companies and theaters in Norway. She is also part of Lonely Riders – a Nordic network on community work and improvisation with dancers from Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Norway. From 2015-17 Karen was the recipient of an artistic work grant from the National Arts Grants. Currently she is teaching movement at a performance art college in Oslo and recently did a research project on Ensemble Thinking facilitated for acting studies. Karen is thrilled to finally hold an Ensemble Thinking Teacher Certification and to be a Lower Left member!

http://www.livingmovement.no/karen-hoslashybakk-mikalsen.html