Georgia Simms is a performing artist, educator and facilitator. Her dance performance career spanning 25 years, both as a company member with Dancetheatre David Earle and as a freelance artist, has taken her to stages in different parts of Canada, France and South Korea.

Since 2005, she has hosted technique classes for adults that honour the lineage of modern dance offered to her by David Earle (co-founder of Toronto Dance Theatre in 1968) and Suzette Sherman, with strong ties to the work of Martha Graham, José Limón and other leaders of American and Canadian dance.

Sensing the edges of a ritualized technical practice, both for herself and her community of students, she began an investigation of improvisation in 2006 as part of a Guelph-based collective, Fall on your Feet, with Janet Johnson, Catrina von Radecki, Lynette Segal, Tanya Williams and Kelly Steadman. Finding ongoing astonishment and discovery in this realm, she established a class in dancetheatre improvisation in 2014 with musician Adam Bowman which continues to grow. The group explores an ever-evolving syllabus of tasks and parameters that provoke a generous investigation of the responsibilities and consequences of individual and collective choice-making.

She remains grateful for the opportunity to have been an artist-in-residence with Guelph Dance in 2020-2021 and for ongoing involvement as a choreographer and teacher with the Guelph Youth Dance Training Program.

Alongside her dance career have been academic pursuits including a Bachelor’s Degree in International Development and Environmental Studies, a Master’s Degree in Geography with an emphasis on environmental governance, and an integration of her worlds through arts-based community engagement through various projects. A long time member of the University of Guelph professional community, she has worked as a practitioner-in-residence with Community Engaged Scholarship Institute, a facilitator with ReVision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, a workshop leader with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, and a Sessional Instructor with the former First Year Seminar Program.

Georgia also weaves movement and improvisation into methodology, program design, evaluation and group facilitation as an invited consultant and workshop leader for regional arts organizations and universities, most recently with Art Not Shame, Guelph Youth Music Centre, Elora Centre for the Arts, and McMaster University.

She is currently working toward a PhD with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph and making an artful life with her husband, Adam, and their seven-year old daughter.