Biography

Upon graduating from The Scottish School of Contemporary Dance in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts, she began her professional career with Club Guy & Roni’s Poetic Disasters Club. In 2017 Courtney entered into an on-going collaboration with Flemish choreographer Jan Martens, performing in RULE OF THREE (2017), any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones (2021) and VOICE NOISE (2024). Meanwhile, she performed in Festzug (2021) and A Divine Comedy (2021) by Austrian performance artist Florentina Holzinger. Most recently, she worked as a performer with Maxime Dreesen in Peekaboo (2025) and soon with Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe in A RITE OF SPRING (2026).

Courtney’s own choreographic voice began emerging in underground spaces in the Netherlands, evolving over the years into a small but distinctive body of solo performances. Her work as a maker is driven by the raw, the rigorous, and the ruptured, often exploring sociopolitical questions through the lens of the personal, the grotesque, and the uncanny. She crafts work that insists on emotional intensity, layered contradiction and sharp conceptual edges, inviting audiences into sensorial universes where feeling precedes understanding. 

In the pleasure of stepping off a horse when it’s moving at full speed (2020), she interrogates domination and surrender through the metaphor of horse taming. In THE WOMAN DESTROYED (2022), she embodies ethical dilemmas in generative art by responding in real time to a custom-coded digital environment. And in HUNTER (2024), she duets with a life-sized doll replica of herself in an uncanny exploration of self-objectification, horror aesthetics, and the grotesque feminine. 

Though rooted in her background in a range of dance styles, Courtney’s practice is in constant dialogue with various artistic disciplines cutting across performance art, video, computer coding, puppetry, and visual design. Whether battling light beams, surrendering to algorithmic systems, or navigating a monstrous double, she builds haunting and immersive encounters that blur the boundaries between control and collapse, rigor and rebellion, chaos and structure.

A nomadic and self-produced artist, Courtney has worked in close collaboration with various production houses including Dansateliers, DansBrabant and ICK Artist Space. Between 2024 – 2027 Courtney is part of the talent development program at the Grand Theater Groningen.  

For the concept of THE WOMAN DESTROYED Courtney was awarded De Troffel Prijs 2020 – Festival Cement’s incentive prize for young makers – and nominated for Het Theater Festival Belgium’s equivalent; Roel Verniers Prijs. In 2021 she was awarded the Young Amsterdam Art Prize, and in 2022 her first solo work, the pleasure of stepping off a horse when it’s coming at full speed, was selected for Aerowaves Twenty22. Her latest work HUNTER was awarded the VSCD Mime / Performance Prize 2024 at the Netherlands Theater Festival, listed in NRC’s 10 Best Dance Performances of 2024, and in 2025 Courtney was named NRC’s Rising Star in Dance.