sweetgrass

Amy Leona Havin is a Director, Producer, Filmmaker, and Choreographer originally from Rehovot, Israel and currently based in Portland, Oregon. Havin is the Artistic Director of Portland based dance film and performance company, The Holding Project, which she founded in 2015. She began her dance training with Ohad Naharin’s Gaga Movement Language as well as the Royal Academy of Dance and Vaganova classical ballet techniques, and attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2013.

Havin has been granted acceptance to train under and learn from internationally celebrated filmmakers, choreographers, dance artists such as Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company's Rami Be'er (Israel), L-E-V's Sharon Eyal (Israel), Ate9's Danielle Agami (Los Angeles), Yasmeen Godder (Israel), Shahar Binyamini (Israel), the HASADNA program (Israel), Wade Madsen (Seattle), Tori Wranes (Norway), Deborah Wolf (Seattle), Corrie Beffort (Seattle), and more. Along with The Holding Project, she was an Artist in Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in 2016, received a Portland Dance Film Fest Audience Award for ‘sweetgrass’ in 2018, and represented women directors in dance film as an expert panelist for the Portland Dance Film fest in both 2017 and 2018.

Havin’s unique choreography, duration based performance work, and dance films have been shown both on the west coast and internationally. She has taught as an instructor of ballet, contemporary movement, and choreographic techniques, and continues to teach improvisation based movement classes through her ongoing series of facilitated workshops at FLOCK Dance Center in Portland, Oregon, which explore the infinite possibilities of the body in motion.