ANN PAPOULIS is a visual and performing artist. The foundation of her work is dancing. She began studying ballet at age 11, trained at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York and studied flamenco with José Molina. Her musical training is in clarinet, voice, piano; she studied theater at the HB Studios in New York. She has a BA in History from Bryn Mawr College, studied Oral History at Columbia University and has an MBA from Grenoble École de Management.

Her solo work has been performed in theaters and festivals in the US and throughout Europe, including at the Serious Fun Festival, Lincoln Center, NYC; ImpulsTanz Festival, Vienna; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Maison de la Culture, Grenoble.
She created groupworks for companies in Copenhagen, Zagreb and Ljubljana.
Her films, photographs & paintings have been exhibited in Paris on Bateau Daphné docked on the Seine below Notre Dame ; in Atelier de la Main d’Or near Place de la Bastille; at the Musée Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in Vernon. A selection of her SkyWaters photographs are installed in surgery centers on Madison Avenue, NYC & in Austin, Texas. She has created the concept for an Aquatic Waiting Room, a waiting room — for doctors’ offices, lobbies of businesses, waiting rooms for agents — that involves meditative water films and other aquatic artworks that offer solace and reflection, calming the nervous system.

While living in Ljubljana during the 1990s, she served as a choreographer for Slovenian theater directors, working with the actors on the physicality of text and on the dialogue between words and physical movement. She worked frequently with Eduard Miler, notably on Heiner Müller’s The Task.
She was rehearsal assistant for Jean-Claude Gallotta in Grenoble and for Frédéric Flamand in Brussels.

She began teaching at the Cunningham Studio in New York at age 23 and has taught Merce’s technique for companies and schools throughout Europe including Opéra de Lyon, Anna Teresa de Keesmaeker, Philippe Decouflé, Maguy Marin, Wim Vandekeybus, Angelin Preljocaj, Àngels Margarit. She is completing Merce’s Meaning, a book about Cunningham’s approach to art and life, that draws from her own experiences and from interviews she conducted with Merce and with dancers from the early years of the company.

She has had residencies at the Pavillion des Jouets - Gao Bo, in Vernon, France, December 2024; at the Ionion Center for the Arts on the island of Kefalonia in Greece in May and September 2022; on l’île verte periodically from 2019 to the present.

The IRIS Map, her method for exploring & navigating the imagination, is the foundation for workshops she has given to performing & visual artists throughout Europe, most recently at the Drama Academy in Ljubljana and the Slovenian Fine Arts Academy. The method is also used for personal evolution.

The IRIS Map also serves as the architecture for her interventions as an Imagination Activator in the business world, where she has given seminars and speeches for companies and schools, notably Air Liquide, Eurofound EU, Sciences Po Paris, HEC Paris, Institut de Vinci Paris, American Chamber of Commerce Lyon, TEDxSaclay, IEDC Bled, Slovenia, The Circle Budapest. In 2019, she led a one year Team Evolution project for an Open Innovation team at the Fortune 500 French aeronautics company, Groupe Safran.

In the field of mental health, she employs the IRIS Map to liberate imaginative energies so as to enhance mental, emotional, physical & spiritual health. In 2024-2025, she conducted a biweekly 8 month seminar with a group of psychiatric outpatients at the Clinique des Portes de l’Eure in Vernon. She danced with them, painted, engaged in guided meditations, animated stories, walked along the Seine, observed and reflected on the paintings in the Impressionist Museum where the seminar was held. The 7 women participants appear in a film she created: Spirits of the Seine‍.

Cyrus Duff is working on an odyssey, a documentary about her work and life.

If you are interested in supporting and joining the hunt Ann and her collaborators are now embarking on, you will be most welcome. You can click here:
Zasledovanje (The Hunt) - Seed Funds

Originally from New York, Ann is based in Paris.