The Artistic Team for documenta 16: Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Xiaoyu Weng, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Naomi Beckwith (f.l.t.r.), Kassel 2025. Photo: Nicolas Wefers
Aug 21, 2025
Pina Bausch Fellowship for Former Solitude Fellows
© Lea Gubic
We have great news to share! Mounir Saeed, together with collaboration partner Rachel C. Walker, has been awarded the Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography.
Mounir Saeed is an Egyptian artist working with dance and music. His work looks at chaos, instinct, and survival through the body and sound. Important steps in his path include Akademie Schloss Solitude, La Biennale di Venezia, and research at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior. He won 3rd prize of performance at solo dance festival in Stuttgart and the best theme prize in Teatri Riflessi in Sicily. He explores how movement and sound can reflect social and emotional questions.
During the fellowship, Mounir Saeed will spend six months working with composer Rachel C. Walker in Dresden, Germany. Their research will focus on Chaos theory as it relates to music and choreography. By combining both theory and experiential research through workshops, they will investigate different possibilities for expressing group dynamics, using notation and integrating musical actions into performance. Rachel’s interdisciplinary background and approach were key motivations for working together.
“Through the last decades, dominant contemporary dance aesthetics have been largely Eurocentric and these narratives have also heavily biased dance pedagogy in the Global South. Mounir Saeed is a choreographer from Cairo who’s work intelligently pushes against this norm, not through a return to the past, but rather, via a well-researched move into the interstices of body and sound – evocative of, but not parodying ideas of breathwork and repetition from the country he resides in.
We hope that through this conversation across disciplines, the interdisciplinary will be defined by more than just multiplicity, but rather, by the complexity of hearing and seeing the other.”
– From the Jury Statement
Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography
A programme of the Arts Foundation of North-Rhine Westphalia and the Pina Bausch Foundation