BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:

June Gersten Roberts is developing her approaches to visual art and film making from over twenty years experience as a dance maker. As a choreographer, she has worked with professional performers, student dancers, community groups and as artistic director with Eating Peaches Dance Theatre; Avis and Company and Figure Ground, touring dance theatre and collaborative dance performances in the UK, USA and Scandinavia Her live performances are noted for their subtle humour, explorations of broken narratives and multiple choreographic voices, explored through collaborative processes and through June’s sensuous and intricate approaches to movement.

Since 2005, June’s focus has shifted from choreographing live performances to making films and visual art, searching for lyrical relationships between places, objects and imagination. For the last four years she has been exploring themes of brides, weddings and the Shekina through a series of films, installations and drawings reflecting on bridal fears, fantasies and fairy tales, including the Best Day project with artist Mary Stark, dance film As Is The Mother with artist Jenny McCabe and film and photographic projects with dancers Gerry Turvey and Rachel Thomas including Chiaroscuro Studies and Dwelling Within

June’s interest in film making emerged from a desire to make solitary dances in isolated locations, using the camera to transform private contemplations into public screenings. Her first films, Chasing Angels and Elusive Bodies, were made with dancer Gerry Turvey, in the Yorkshire landscape. Since then, June has been making dance films, including Grey and directing digital shorts, including The Projectionist and Lily which have screened at national and international festivals. She has worked on several film making projects with young people, including the poetic documentary short, Letter To Mr. X and is currently researching child led approaches with dance artists Small Things, at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool.

June believes in the vitality of the relationship between teaching and making; she has taught on community projects and in Further and Higher Education including Blackburn College and University of York St John. She is now a senior lecturer in Dance at Edge Hill University, where she teaches dance theory and practice

Having grown up in up in New York, June trained in dance at Middlesex University and at University of Surrey and now lives in the Yorkshire Dales, with her husband, the visual artist Tony Roberts and their sons.

This is not the biography June envisioned while growing up. She imagined a romantic future as a radical environmental activist and first came to England to study environmental sciences; It was while working with the political performance company Just Fooling Silent Theatre that she discovered a passion for making dance, which has been shaping her life ever since.