Pauline Jennings is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, educator, and arts leader whose work brings together performance, media, technology, science, installation, and public engagement. Often developed through collaboration, her work explores emergent forms, responsive systems, and audience interactivity, creating situations in which performers and audiences discover the work together. Across stage, screen, gallery, and public space, Jennings is interested in how individuals and communities navigate rapidly changing social and technological environments—and in the possibilities for curiosity, connection, and agency within that change.
Jennings’ work has been presented internationally at museums, galleries, festivals, and public sites including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Burlington City Arts, Hamiltonian Gallery, EMPAC, New York Live Arts, Merce Cunningham Studio, MuseumsQuartier Wien, Institut Intermédií in Prague, Eastern Bloc in Montreal, ISEA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Planning Exhibition in Shenzhen.
In 2019, Jennings collaborated with visual artist Heather Theresa Clark on neighboring|towns, an immersive four-channel video and sound installation exploring borders, restriction of movement, and family and community life. Centered on the border communities of Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, the project considered a place where families affected by U.S. immigration and travel restrictions could reunite across an international boundary. neighboring|towns premiered at Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC.
In 2019, Jennings was an artist-in-residence at Lake Studios Berlin, where she collaborated with Joshua Lacourse on 13 Minutes of Nothing (Give or Take) and Eins, Zwei, Fünf und Sechs. The latter was an audience-interactive duet that invited strangers of all ages to participate in the work by taking turns rolling four oversized dice, making chance and collective decision-making part of the performance.
In 2018, Jennings presented Becoming Human, a major exhibition at Burlington City Arts supported by BCA’s Project Vermont and the Vermont Performance Lab’s SEED Award. The exhibition brought together The Air Connects Us, a three-channel video and sound installation; Sea Inside Our Skin, a full-evening intermedia performance; a city-wide participatory performance adventure co-presented by UVM’s EcoCultureLab; and workshops, artist conversations, and educational programming.
Jennings was commissioned by artist and director Heidi Boisvert to choreograph radical [signs of life], which premiered at EMPAC in 2013. One of the earliest large-scale works of its kind to integrate networked bodies, biophysical sensing, interactive media, and contemporary dance, the project used performers’ physiological data to shape responsive sound and visualization in real time. The project became a springboard for Jennings’ continued exploration of emergent and responsive performance systems, including Encrypted Trajectory. She later presented this work at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Dubai, where she participated in a panel on interactive technologies and movement.
Jennings is based in Vermont, where she serves as Deputy Director of The Current — A Center for Contemporary Art. She previously taught contemporary art, performance, and social-justice-focused interdisciplinary coursework at Saint Michael’s College and spent nearly two decades at UC Berkeley working across interdisciplinary research, education, communications, and public engagement. She has also taught, lectured, and presented workshops at institutions including Mills College, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Zayed University, NYU Shanghai, UC Berkeley, Arizona State University, Amherst College, Dartmouth College, the University of Maine, College of Santa Fe, and the University of New Mexico. Jennings holds an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Mills College and a BA in Integrative Arts from Penn State University.