Jackie Sheppard is an award-winning Creator, dancer, performing artist; and creative design and consultant, based in Narrm Melbourne, hailing from of the D'Galag Clan Group of Far North Queensland. Jackie works in interdisciplinary dance practice and embodied storytelling. Extending into mixed modalities, they have engaged in writing for stage, puppetry, installation, site activation and endurance work. Jackie Culminates their knowledge in First Nations storytelling & dance methodology, Deep Listening, performance & somatics to investigate the multi-dimensions of the self in relationship to Land, Ancestor, Kin, and cosmos. They engage mixedalities in research in an attempt to relocate oneself back into a cultural context and unpack the complex grieve and trauma of systemic displacement.
Through their embodied practice, Jackie taps into unseen parts of our collective unconscious, and lifts sediments of story that hide withinin the layers and formations of our embodied landscapes, awaiting to be witnessed and integarted . Jackie's creative practice defies the reigns of genre, and explores forms of expression and performance that honour complex relationships with Country. They intentionally bring forth the ugly and obscure to the surface, allowing audiences and onlookers to bear witness to the shared hidden canyons of history. Equally, they make way for tenderness and love to take form in their work as an ritual of remedy, softening the sharp edges of life, working story as medicine.
Jackie is currently studying their Master of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, where they are applying their research into their coursework, which researches the body as a Cultural landscape enriched with potentiality. Jackie perceives their research through a First Nations and inter-cultural diasporic lens, exploring what it means to find home in a body that has been displaced and subjugated. Jackie invites the possibility of discovering freedom & healing while existing in paradigms of war and contraction, drawing on their Ancestral wisdom and intelligence as a means to give rise to empowermernt.
Jackie Sheppard is a Cultural and creative consultant, combining their knowledge base in First Nations place-making and relationality. Their skills in place-based somatic movement/embodiment provide a nuanced, dynamic and insigthful perspective within a broad range of spaces & industries.
Some notable works of Jackie’s includes ‘The Honouring’, a solo dance theatre and puppetry production devised, directed, and performed by Jackie Sheppard - Yirramboi Festival 2019 & Frame Festival Biennial of Dance 2023 – ‘The Honouring’ received a Greenroom Award for Breaking Ground in Dance; ‘Wild Australia – Men in Chains’, an endurance piece & roving installation work - Yirramboi Festival 1017; ‘Iron Valley’ – a play with dance and somatic storytelling – a work in progress, written and devised by Jackie Sheppard.
