COSMIN MANOLESCU is a dance-maker, community builder and curator, choreographer and performer, independent cultural expert and artistic director of Serial Paradise Company/ Gabriela Tudor Foundation based in Bucharest (Romania). He is currently interested in cross-border cultural exchange, experiments and artistic innovation, leading a series of international projects, teaching and coaching young people and artists across borders and generating artistic ideas and experiences that challenge the audience.
Since 1997 Cosmin played an important role in the development of contemporary dance in Romania and in the creation of National Dance Centre Bucharest (2004).
In 2009 he was selected one of 12 European dance-makers to participate in the Asia-Europe Dance Forum organised by ASEF and Alkantara festival in Lisbon. In 2012 he was awarded with a fellowship by The Saison Foundation in Tokyo to discover and connect with Japanese dance scene. One year later he launched Eastern Connection, a longterm platform for exchange and artistic collaboration involving artists, dance writers and producers from Romania and Japan (2013-2015).
Between 2012-2014 Cosmin Manolescu was artistic director of ZonaD laboratory space, teaching regularly dance workshops, developing community projects and working with disabled people, running monthly jam-sessions and presenting dance films. He has a special interest in working with disabled people, children and young people.
In 2014 he developed his own method, the emotional body, a holistic approach of the body that includes touch, yoga exercises and sensorial/small motions, and that he is teaching in his international projects and also using in his performances.
He made his debut as a choreographer as part of the Marginalii Group (1993-1995). His works and projects were successfully presented in important festivals and venues such as Lyon Dance Biennale, Festival de la Nouvelle Danse d’Uzes, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122 New Tork, Sushi Theatre San Diego, Enzimi Rome Festival, Dublin Dance Festival, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris, Morishita Studio/ Dance New Air Tokyo, Beirut Street Festival, Dansstationen Malmo, Brakke Grond Amsterdam, BananneFabrik/ Choregraphic Dance Centre in Luxembourg, Time to Dance festival Riga, Seattle International Dance Festival etc.
His recent artistic projects include Dans-Wanderer, a branched tree-like artistic project for urban and natural landscape (2017-2020) and Eventually, Everything Will Make Sense created for MARe/Recent Art Museum in Bucharest (2020). In January 2019 Cosmin Manolescu launched Emotional Europe, a multi-layered exchange project about youth, power of civic engagement in Europe, as part of the Next Generation, Please! programme of BOZAR in Brussels.
For his contribution to the development of contemporary dance in Romania and support of the independent cultural scene he received the Award of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art (1998), the excellency award of the National Dance Centre Bucharest (2014) and the award for 20 years of cultural resistance from the Administration of the National Cultural Fund in Romania (2017).
Currently, Cosmin Manolescu is co-founder of the AREAL collective aiming to open a new space for choreographic development and organising the annual Gabriela Tudor residency programme in Portugal and Romania.