The MOV’IN Cannes 2025 jury

Stephanie Keane

Irish choreographer-director – winner Grand Prix 2023

Stephanie Keane is an Irish dance artist from Limerick, Ireland. She is a dance performer, choreographer, filmmaker and theatre-maker. Immersed in Irish dance for over 40 years, she continues to evolve as a dancer and dance maker, exploring and developing contemporary dance practices, music production techniques and sound and visual design tools. Sound exploration and the musicality of percussive dance form the basis of her practice. In 2020, she received support from the Arts Council of Ireland to direct, produce and choreograph her film Eist (Listen), which won the MOV’IN Cannes Grand Prix in November 2023 as part of the Cannes – Côte d’Azur Dance Festival. She is currently working on a new film/theater project, blending her love of Irish and electronic music with percussive and contemporary dance, funded by the Traditional Arts Council of Ireland.

José Montalvo

Choreographer and director of MAC Créteil

Choreographer, video artist, director and set designer, José Montalvo has created some thirty works, sometimes in duo with Dominique Hervieu, sometimes on his own. With a flamenco-dancing mother who took him to see musicals over and over again, the young man was fascinated by the language of the body from an early age. Yet it was to art history and the visual arts that he turned when he entered university. His professional dance training began in parallel with his studies, with the American Jerome Andrews and Françoise and Dominique Dupuy. In addition, he perfected his skills in workshops led by such great names as Lucinda Childs, Carolyn Carlson, Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham.

His professional career began in the late 1970s, first as a dancer with the Ballets Modernes de Paris, then as a choreographer in 1986. It was at a Peter Goss class that he met Dominique Hervieu, who quickly became the dancer of choice for his shows and a key artistic partner. From then on, the two dancers worked together, founding their own company in 1998, soberly named compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu. Together, they developed a particular gestural style to create original choreographies, in a body language all their own.

From piece to piece, their choreographic writing is characterized by a remarkable blend of dance styles and digital technologies. She superimposes the living and the virtual, reality and imagination, the traditional stage and video projections, with a pronounced taste for collage, crossbreeding and the hybridization of genres and imaginations.

Winner of the most prestigious awards in contemporary dance since 1986, José Montalvo was in turn director of the CCN de Créteil, artistic director of the Théâtre national de Chaillot and finally director of the Maison des arts et de la culture de Créteil Grand – Grand Paris Sud Est Avenir. From September 2016 to December 2024, José Montalvo directed the Maison des Arts de Créteil – Grand Paris Sud Est Avenir, developing an artistic project rooted in the values of aesthetic cross-fertilization, redoubled dialogue between forms, and broad openness to new contemporary writing. Today, he devotes himself exclusively to his original passion, choreographic creation.

Cynthia Odier

Director of the Fluxum Foundation

Cynthia Odier, a Swiss of Greek origin, trained in classical dance at the Geneva Conservatory, before joining the ballet company of the Grand Théâtre de Genève. In 2000, she proposed a reconstruction of the ballet La Création du Monde in collaboration with the Grand Théâtre and the ensemble Contrechamps. This project was presented in the courtyard of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève, and marked the entry of dance into the museum space in Geneva.

In 2002, Cynthia Odier created the Fluxum Foundation and in 2003 the Flux Laboratory in Geneva. An artistic incubator, Flux Laboratory’s mission is to encourage innovative collaborative dynamics through experimental, transdisciplinary artistic projects. This was followed by an opening in Zurich in 2013 and the creation of the Flux Box in 2014: an itinerant concept space which, in addition to presenting the archives, offers performances in synergy with the venues that host it. In 2016, Flux Laboratory moved to Athens. Under the aegis of the Swiss Embassy in Greece and the Greek Ministry of Culture, it supports and produces Greek artists.

On December 6, 2021, Cynthia Odier was awarded the title of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. For many years, Cynthia Odier has been involved in various foundations and boards of directors: Le Prix de Lausanne, Des cinémas pour l’Afrique, No Difference, SOS Enfants, FIFDH, Opéra Lab. She is also a UNESCO ambassador for dance. More recently, Cynthia Odier was invited to join the Program Committee of the Pôle de création numérique.

Sjón

Poet, novelist, Björk lyricist and screenwriter

Born in Reykjavík in 1962, Sjón is an internationally acclaimed Icelandic author of novels, poetry, librettos and screenplays. His novels, such as The Blue Fox, have been translated into 40 languages and received literary awards and nominations worldwide.

Also working in film, he wrote the screenplay for the Icelandic film Lamb, presented in the “Un Certain Regard” selection at Cannes in 2021, which won the Jury’s Special Prize. His screenplay for The Northman, which premiered in 2022, was co-written with director Robert Eggers. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2001 for writing the lyrics to the songs performed by Björk in Lars von Trier’s musical drama Dancer in the Dark.

In 2017, Sjón became the third writer – after Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell – to contribute to Future Library, a Norwegian-based public artwork spanning 100 years. In 2023, he was awarded the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, the academy’s second-highest award after the Nobel Prize. He was named Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2021 for his contribution to literature, film and songwriting.