Hollyhock Presenters

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Our presenters are curated for their quality, depth, integrity, and alignment with our educational purpose. Since 1982, a distinguished faculty of authors, educators, activists, artists, performers, and practitioners have shared their work at our Cortes Island campus and in Vancouver.

People smiling at Activate 2023 Hollyhock Leadership Institute

Shannon Litzenberger

Shannon Litzenberger (she/her, Tkaronto) is an award-winning contemporary dancer, choreographer, director and embodiment facilitator. Inspired by the borderless landscapes of her prairie homeland, she creates sensory-rich multi-disciplinary performance experiences that animate our relationship to land, community and the forgotten wisdom of the body. An imaginative creator, she often develops unique collaborations across art forms and communities, centring participatory experiences in artistic processes. Throughout her 20+ year career, her work has been presented across Canada and the US, in collaboration with many of Canada’s leading artists across disciplines.

The creative principles and embodied practices she works with regularly in the studio are also central to her work in leadership development, organizational culture development, public policy development and systems change. Backed by a growing body of emergent research from across a spectrum of fields in both the sciences and humanities, her approach to personal and collective transformation focuses on recovering our capacity to feel and sense ourselves and the world around us as a way of knowing, being and co-creating. She works frequently across corporate, academic and non-profit spaces, with organizations such as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), the Ivey Business School at Western University, Memorial University, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Department of Canadian Heritage, Canada Council for the Arts, Cultural Pluralism Movement in the Arts – Ontario (CPAMO), and others in support of creating a healthier, more interconnected, equitable and resilient society.

Events with Shannon Litzenberger

Wild Soma Being and Becoming: Embodied Practices for Collective Thriving
June 23 - 28, 2024

In this time of intersecting social, political, and planetary crises, how do we embrace and honour all that is arising in us as bodies? What if we listen closely to what we feel in our hearts, what we sense in our bones, and what we know in our guts? Can…