Cathy Marston is a choreographer, artistic director and Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow. After education in Cambridge, she spent two years at the Royal Ballet School, before launching a successful international career now spanning over twenty years.

Cathy’s great gift is to join artistic dots, creating form for stories, emotions and ideas. She inherited a passion for literature from her English-teacher parents. For Cathy, stories inform dance. As Associate Artist of the Royal Opera House for five years, she created a critically acclaimed interpretation of Ibsen’s Ghosts. During her six-year tenure in Switzerland directing the Bern Ballett, her British ‘respect for the playwright’ became influenced by the ideas of German theatre and ‘Director’s Theatre’, resulting in her unique, hybrid signature. Lending new perspectives to old narratives in her versions of Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Narbokov’s Lolita, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or in her historically-inspired Witch-hunt: all are danced-stories stripped back to their essence and displaying high quality technique and unflinching expressive integrity.

Passionate about opening original ideas to new audiences, Cathy crafts unexpected matches between classical and contemporary art forms, for example, commissioning a new score for soprano voice and female beat-boxer by Dave Maric, or commissioning composer, Gabriel Prokofiev, to write for orchestra and DJ for her full-length ballet, Ein Winternachtstraum.

Cathy’s proudest moments include major creations for San Francisco Ballet, Northern Ballet, Danish Royal Ballet (and many more) as well as launching her charitable company, The Cathy Marston Project.