Jessie Owens

Jessie Owens is a performing artist, choreographer, and a structural integration and embodiment practitioner. 

She is the founder of ERGO/movement, a collaborative performance project, through which she has created both stage and site-specific performances and fostered relationships with artists, performers, and Vermont's unique landscapes. 

A current ongoing project is an improvisation performance collective of dancers and musicians, called soft rocks, founded in 2023. 
Her choreographic work has been highly influenced by the years she spent performing with a Weimar-style cabaret. She is also partial to the works of Pina Bausch and Sasha Waltz, who connect her culturally and aesthetically to Germany, where she was born and spent her childhood years. 

Jessie has also performed with other VT based choreographers and companies, including Hanna Satterlee and Animal Dance, Murmurations Dance, and Joy Madden. 
She was a founding board member of the Vermont Dance Alliance, and served as Vice President from 2017 until 2022.

In 2022, she completed both a practitioner certification in Structural Integration with Anatomy Trains, and a masters degree in Embodiment Studies at Goddard College. Her ongoing research into fascia, sensory perception, and the art/practice of changing/evolving postural and emotional patterns greatly informs her work as an artist. 

Jessie holds a BA in Dance and German Studies from Smith College, where she attended as an Ada Comstock scholar, or a non-traditional student in her early thirties. There she performed in works by Chris Aiken, Candice Saylers, Joy Davis, Katie Martin, and Annie Rudnick. In 2014, she performed her work, An Accidental Flourish Caused by a Sudden Change of Direction at the American College Dance Festival at Boston University. 

From 2002 to 2012, she performed with Burlington’s Spielpalast Cabaret, a non-profit dance and theater company modeled after German Weimar Era cabarets. She was the group’s art director and co-producer from 2005 until 2013. With Spielpalast, she played many characters onstage and behind the scenes, such as designing and creating both costumes and marketing material, writing press releases and raising funds, telling bad jokes, dancing the Charleston, Can Can, and many a chair dance, and also sang an occasional German torch song. She co-produced performances annually in Burlington and throughout Vermont, as well as the group’s venture to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2011.