Bio
Isabel Bowser is a transdisciplinary dance artist and choreographer based in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Alfred University in 2015 with a BFA in Visual Art and a minor in Dance. She received her MFA in Dance at the Ohio State University in 2025. She has danced for Momar Ndiaye, Ben Roach and Abby Zbikowski and has studied at Ecole des Sables in Senegal. Isabel has performed solo work at the International Solo Tanz Theatre Festival in Stuttgart, Germany, the Ohio Dance Festival, City Dance Showcase in Columbus, OH, and Urban Arts Space in Columbus.
For Isabel, dance is ritual play. It is a way for humans to take on new identities and experience fresh realities through physical exploration. She believes dance is capable of returning us to our animal selves by centering sensual awareness. Themes of her work include vitality, animacy, dream or mythic imagery and the more-than-human world. Using elements such as video projection, live music, spoken word, and installation elements she creates dreamlike environments of the dancer’s interstitial experience.
Parallel Project is a collaboration between Isabel and video artist/musician Josh Finck which explores the synthesis of video, sound, and dance. Their most recent project took place over the course of the month of January 2021 while in residency at Revolve Gallery AVL. SUPPOSITION was a multimedia, immersive, live performance series.
Some of Isabel's other collaborators include dancer/choreographers Ben Roach and Alisha Jihn, musicians Anna Slate and Isabel Castellvi, and visual artist Arulu Gallagher.
Artist Statement
I am continually jolted by the sensuous delight and searing urgency of being a body alive. My dance practice is an ongoing act of gratitude and wonder in the face of the simple fact of vital presence. I consider sensations of aliveness experienced through dance to be politically and culturally potent. In tracing my vitality, I contend with death, decomposition, and regrowth. Through practices of imaginative embodiment, I play at becoming something else, tipping into complex relations with places and beings beyond the human. I use movement as a technology for accessing heightened states of sensory awareness and visceral explorations. In my experience, the animacy of the world busts apart Western, anthropocentric notions of who is alive and worthy of care. Using physical impulses, repeated gestures, and image based improvisational structures, my dancers and I dig into what writer Sophie Strand describes as “the animate everything.” Instead of attempting to clean up the mess or reach a state of purity, we writhe and morph into and out of complex entanglements with each other, our surroundings, and the more-than-human. The hope is that these imperfect attempts to embody beyond the human build resilience and empathy that facilitates deeper connection and culpability between us and our world(s).