PhD Alumni

Jonathan Osborn is a Toronto-based choreographer, educator, and researcher whose interests include human-animal relations, research as practice, embodied perception, simulation, and the staging of nonhuman life within dance, animation, video games, and social institutions. A graduate of the Toronto Dance Theatre’s professional training program, Jonathan also studied at the Merce Cunningham Studio and Jacob’s Pillow. Jonathan holds an MA in Dance from York University, a BA in English Literature from UBC, and completed his SSHRC funded PhD dissertation about kinaesthetic human-animal relations and zoological gardens entitled "Between Species: Choreographing Human and Animal Bodies,” under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Sellers-Young in the spring of 2019.

His interdisciplinary academic work has been published in various collected editions including Narrating Performance (2018) and Zoo Studies and New Humanities (2019) and recent artistic projects include: Growing the Past, a three-week multi-artist summer residency and performance project at the Spadina Museum supported by the Toronto Arts Council focusing on choreographic interpretations of the site’s Edwardian garden landscape, and the creation ARK and ARCHE, two Toronto and Ontario Arts council supported works about zoological space at the Toronto Zoo and Zoologischer Garten Berlin. While at York University Jonathan was a contributing member of the Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology Graduate Caucus, the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, and the York Popular Culture Working Group, the curator of the Sensorium Graduate Salon, a student representative on FGS council, and the co-curator for the conferences Collapsing Constellations: Remapping Art Science and the Planetary (2015) and Skin: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cybernetic Containers. (2016).  Jonathan currently serves as a research assistant on Dr. Jody Berland’s SSHRC funded project Digital Animalities: Media Representations of Non-Human Life.

Dance PhD