Eva Urbanová is a queer Slovak-born choreographer, dancer and performance maker based in Vienna. Her work explores transformation, sensory intelligence, and deep relationality. Her practice moves beyond performance into somatic and collective processes – where altered states, touch, and the unruly body unsettle normativity and awaken embodied knowledge. Her background in rhythmic gymnastics forms an early physical foundation for this work: a training of precision, elasticity, endurance, and extreme bodily modulation that later evolved into her research on the monstrous and shape-shifting body - an embodiment that moves through tension, friction, and felt disruption.
Inhabiting the monster allows Eva to access an altered sensory state where pain and pleasure reconfigure, and the body becomes a site of intuitive perception. This figure disorients linear time and normative rhythms, inviting both performer and witness into a queer, posthuman terrain of becoming. Drawing from feminist and queer theory Eva engages with the monstrous not as spectacle but as a practice of emancipation - reclaiming the body as a site of transgression, ancestral memory, and embodied knowledge.
Eva holds a master degree in choreography from Prague's AMU and has studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. Her main success is her solo piece THE ESSENCE (2021), her first work after completing her studies. It has been presented at numerous international festivals, winning first place at the Gdansk Dance Festival in 2022, second place at the Tanz Theater Stuttgart International Competition in 2021, and was selected for the Slovak Dance Platform in 2023. Her second work after graduation, ANOMALIE (2022), was included in the main program of the Czech Dance Platform in 2023. Her last work, titled CREATURES OF TOUCH (2025), premiered in March 2025 in Bratislava, Slovakia. The piece invites a heightened sensory experience - especially through touch - offering an alternative, sensitive way of relating to materiality and connection. In addition to her choreographic work, she is an experienced contemporary dance teacher, teaching both professionals and non-professionals, including students at dance conservatories and children as young as seven.