Fabrice Mazliah is a Swiss choreographer, performer, and teacher whose work unfolds at the intersection of movement, language, perception, and relational practices. Over more than two decades, he has developed choreographies and performance installations that explore how thought becomes embodied and how action emerges through the continuous negotiation between bodies, objects, atmospheres, technologies, language, and the spaces they inhabit. His work seeks to reconfigure relationships: between subject and object, human and other-than-human, intention and emergence.

Born in Geneva in 1972, Mazliah studied dance at the Geneva School of Dance, the Brigitte Matteuzzi School, the Rudra Béjart School in Lausanne, and the National School of Dance in Athens. He joined Nederlands Dans Theater in 1994 and was for nearly two decades a member of Ballett Frankfurt / The Forsythe Company (1997–2015) under the direction of William Forsythe. This period profoundly shaped his understanding of choreography as a space of collaboration, embodied research, and expanded forms of thinking through movement.

Alongside his independent choreographic work, Mazliah has initiated and co-founded several collaborative structures and artistic platforms, including the collective MAMAZA with Ioannis Mandafounis and May Zahry (2010–2014), the HOOD ensemble at PACT Zollverein (2016–2018), Werkstatt (2021–2023), a multipurpose space dedicated to supporting the contemporary dance and performance community in Frankfurt, the production platform Work of Act (2018), and the Basel-based association Fabulous Things (2024). Through these initiatives, he has continued to develop collective, process-oriented, and interdisciplinary modes of artistic creation.

Over the years, he has created numerous choreographic works and performance installations, both independently and collaboratively. His earlier works include Remote Versions (2003), developed with the chekroun / mazliah / san martin collective, P.A.D. (2007) and Eifo Efi (2013) with Ioannis Mandafounis, and ZERO (2010) and Cover Up (2011) with the collective MAMAZA. In 2015, he created In Act and Thought for the closing of The Forsythe Company.

In 2018, Mazliah initiated The Manufactured Series, an ongoing cycle of duets between a human body and a non-human body that explores questions of mutual agency, perception, materiality, and relationality — playing and being played, touching and being touched. This line of inquiry unfolds further in works such as Embodying Bodies (2023), which engages with the biological and philosophical notion of the symbiotic holobiont, and The End of Things, The Things of Ends (2024), created for the dance company of Theater Basel, reflecting on endings as generative processes within dance, memory, and collective experience.

Recent works include SHEELA (2024), an adaptation of Sheela na Gig for six female performers centred on voice, resonance, labour, and collective presence; In Cite In Site In Sight (2025), which explores our material entanglement with the world through air, sound, image, memory, and matter; and BONES (2025), developed in collaboration with curator Claude Jansen, an immersive work interweaving analog, spiritual, and digital dimensions through questions of animism, embodiment, and colonial histories. His latest creation, CARNOID (2026), premiered at Kaserne Basel and brings into focus the complex and often contradictory relationship between human bodies and technological objects.

Mazliah’s works have been presented internationally at venues and festivals including Tanzplattform Deutschland, Swiss Dance Days, PACT Zollverein, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, deSingel, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Opéra de Lyon Ballet, Seoul International Dance Festival, Kyoto Experiment, Théâtre de la Ville, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

In 2024, he was artist-in-residence at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm and at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Alongside his artistic work, he regularly teaches and mentors internationally in the fields of choreography, improvisation, movement research, and composition. His work unfolds between Frankfurt, Basel, and international contexts.