Hope Mohr co-directs The Bridge Project with Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero. Mohr is the Founder and Artistic Director of HMD. She has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, community organizer, and writer. In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance to create, present and foster outstanding art at the intersection of the body and the brain. She founded The Bridge Project in 2010.
As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. As a choreographer, Mohr makes work that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that just ride underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). Her choreography has been presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), SFMOMA, ODC Theater, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among others. She was named to the YBCA 100 in 2015 and was a 2016 Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2014, Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr as one of the “women leaders” in the dance field.
As an activist, Mohr has worked for women’s rights, immigrant rights, and environmental justice through such organizations as AmeriCorps, Earthjustice, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has led community-based performance projects with breast cancer survivors and military veterans. While dancing professionally, Mohr earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Columbia Human Rights Fellow. She is currently partnering with the Sustainable Economies Law Center to offer legal services to artists.
Mohr’s new book, Shifting Cultural Power: Curating as Community Organizing is forthcoming from the University of Akron Press and the National Center for Choreography. Her published writing also includes: Self and System (SFMOMA’s Open Space, November 2019); Choreographic Transmission in an Expanded Field: Reflections on “Ten Artists Respond to Trisha Brown’s Locus” (TDR/The Drama Review, February 2018); and The Language of the Listening Body (Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, July 2007), among others.