lives with her family in Cologne. After graduating in sports (DSHS) with a focus on dance and skiing, she studied dance at the European Dance Development Center (EDDC) in Arnhem, NL and the Moving On Center – School for Participatory Arts and Research (MOC) in San Francisco, USA.
She is artistic director of the company Silke Z./resistdance and the intergeneartional ensemble »die metabolisten« based in Cologne. She develops dance and performance art at home and abroad.
The ensemble – a constantly changing, transdisciplinary space of thought and action – with the focus on dance and performance observes people, society(s) and their movement sequences and shifts. The collaboration of a wide variety of artists, dancers, thinkers, producers, acquisition and office workers makes it possible to examine social and individual movements heterogeneously and from different perspectives.
Her productions have received numerous awards, including the 1999 and 2008 Cologne Dance Awards, the 2000 and 2004 Promotion Awards for Free Theatre NRW Theaterzwang, and nominations for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (California).
For her youth work she was nominated for the German Theatre Prize Der Faust 2013, invited to the 1st Dance Meeting of Youth in Berlin and awarded the Children’s and Youth Theatre Prize in 2015. She is the head of dance and play development at the theatre and media class of the Albertus Magnus Gymnasium in Cologne, where she regularly works on productions with schoolgirls.
Silke Z. heads the ehrenfeldstudios, an intergenerative and interdisciplinary production and work place for free dance in Cologne.
From 2004 to 2008 she curated the dance series Tanzkonkret in Cologne and from 2010 to 2012 the performance series “Wie Leben geht”.
In 2011, together with seven European partners, she founded the studiotrade network, which now counts 15 partners and is a very active network led by artists that offers alternative support to traditional institutions in the production process for artists as well as performance platforms.
In 2014 Silke Z. published a book about the previous dance performance series Unter Uns! entitled: “UNTER UNS! – Artistic Research – Biography – Performance” published by transcript Verlag. Her artistic and practical research on the subject of “Performing Immediacy” takes place as part of a doctorate at the University of Falmouth (GB).
In the winter semester 2018/2019, she will take over the NRW lectureship at the Ruhr University Bochum as part of the M.A. programme Scenic Research.
In 2020 she received conceptual funding from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for her multi-year project “The empathic body”, which is being implemented in cooperation with Fokus Tanz München and the Junge Schauspielhaus Bochum. The result is both intergenerational stage productions with a focus on young people and educational formats that are offered in schools.
