Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

The Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (1973) trained at the Royal Ballet School Antwerp and for twelve years was a high-profile dancer with companies like Djazzex (1993-1997) and Scapino Ballet Rotterdam (1997-2003). The latter company was where she created her first official choreographic works.

In 2003, she said farewell to the stage in order to focus completely on choreography. In the same year, the newspaper NRC called her ‘the rising star of the Dutch dance world’. The versatile choreographer has worked with theatre, opera, musicals and the Dutch fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. In 2008, her international career really took off, and since then she has created new works for more than 75 companies all over the world, including New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballet van Vlaanderen, Joffrey Ballet, Scottish Ballet, West Australian Ballet, Ballet Nacional de Cuba and English National Ballet.

For Dutch National Ballet, Lopez Ochoa has created the workshop ballet Before After (2002), Solitaire (2003), Since (2007), Last Resistance (2018, with Wende Snijders), Frida (2020) and Quasicrystal (2021). Frida arose from the one-act Broken Wings, which she made in 2016 for English National Ballet. At the request of Dutch National Ballet, she developed this piece about the life of Frida Kahlo into a full-length ballet, which received glowing reviews.

Lopez Ochoa has won various prizes for her work, including the British National Dance Award and the South Bank Award for A Streetcar Named Desire (2013), created for Scottish Ballet. In 2019, she received the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.