Celia Krefter

is a genderfluid director, choreographer, lighting designer, writer and musician who makes live music for dancing, dancing for theatre, and theatre for living.

Celia’s work is powered by a rebellious desire to undo form and remake process. Celia rejects borders: between nations, people, and artistic disciplines. She strives to create performance that is uncategorizable. Celia believes that artmaking can and should be fun, joyful, indulgent of every curiosity, abundant with the electric feeling of aliveness, like a day at the playground.

Embodied by a tight-knit ensemble, Celia’s performances are Fibonacci spirals of geometric movement puzzles and clown-ography, with an aesthetic equally influenced by Nintendo DS-era Pokémon games and Madonna music videos, rooted in ecodramaturgies and a feral hope for a better world.

Celia’s original devised dance-theatre works and performance experiments have premiered at The Brick Theater, Movement Research, the Collapsable Hole, The Tank, and the Movement Lab @ Barnard College. She was the 2023-24 Creative Research Fellow at the Movement Lab, and a finalist for the 2025 Exponential Fellowship. As a director and choreographer, Celia’s work spans everything from big gay musicals, to blackbox two-handers, to textless performance art. She designs lights for theatre and dance, and has collaborated with artists including Object Collection, Experiments In Opera, and Radiohole. She plays accordion as one half of the Outdoor Cats, with Pimprenelle Noël on viola. Celia is from Hamburg, Germany, and Cape Cod, MA.

Photo by Joe Navas / Organic Photography