About Yelena Arakelow
Yelena Arakelow (b. 1993, Zürich, Switzerland) has been active in Reykjavik's independent dance scene as a dancer, choreographer, producer, and teacher since graduating in 2018 with a BA in Contemporary Dance from the Iceland University of the Arts. Her specialisation lies in dance lies in improvisation. She likes to question the boundaries of what dance can be and is invested in the unfolding of attention, the use of gaze, asscrack dances, and the intimacy of dwelling in performative states.
In June 2025, she graduated with an MA in Dance from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), and in 2024, Yelena received Nysköpunarsjóður Námsmanna for her research project on archiving strategies through dance notations.
Her latest work, "Waiting for a Dance", a multidisciplinary dance performance, premiered during Ung Nordisk Musik Iceland in 2022. In 2023, the work was shown at Reykjavik Dance Festival, exhibited at Ásmundursalur, and, with the support of Sviðlistamistöð Íslands, toured as a guest performance to Germany, Lithuania, and Switzerland. In 2021, “dwelling in nothingness” was exhibited at Art Gallery Reykjanesbæjar and published in DUNCE Magazine. The same year, she worked as a dancer for Steinunn Ketilsdóttir in "Practice Performed". In 2020, she performed "work (it) out" at Tanzhaus Zürich and collaborated with Klāvs Liepins (LV/IS) to create a site-specific dance performance titled "hair in the colour of crepe paper" for Vides Deja International Dance Festival, Latvia.
Since 2019, she has been teaching Improvisation techniques at LHÍ and has, among other places, taught at Klassiski Listdansskolin and Lýðháskóli Flateyri. In 2018, together with Selma Reynisdóttir, they collaborated on a Nýsköpunarsjóður Námsmanna project called “2D-ance”.
In 2023, whilst working in administration at Dansverkstæðið, Yelena initiated the "North Atlantic Islands Dance Network" for greater sustainability for dance between the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland.
Yelena is also a founding member of "Improv for Dance Enthusiasts" (est. 2021), a dance collective working in Reykjavík with community dance and dance improvisation instruction booklets in four languages. As a collective, they host weekly classes in dance improvisation at Dansverkstæðið that are open to all, and the collective just completed leading two European collaboration projects with the financial support of Erasmus+ Adult Education. In September 2025, they started a new performance research titled "How to build a stage", which will premiere in the summer of 2026.
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