Bio

Virve Sutinen is an independent curator, consultant and senior arts advisor. She has held prominent positions as the artistic director of the Tanz Im August festival in Berlin, Dansens Hus Stockholm, and as the head of Kiasma Theatre and Performing Arts at Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. She has held several positions of trust in international cultural networks and funding bodies.

Sutinen is currently working on Retrospective Gestures, a multiannual project focusing on the choreographic legacies and archiving. In 2025, she co-founded Ars Navitas, a non-profit association implementing projects and initiatives and offering advice and consultation to performing artists, organisations and public bodies. From 2026 to 2027, Ars Navitas is executing Moving in Time – Storytelling project, which involves collecting the life stories of Nordic dance artists.

In her capacity as curator, she is serving as a jury member of ICE HOT Nordic Dance Platform 2026 and consulting Powerhouse International Festival in Brooklyn, New York. She is also advising and mentoring several art organisations and artists.

Ms. Sutinen graduated from New York University and holds an MA in Performance Studies. She is currently the recipient of a writing grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Project

Virve Sutinen is currently working on a multi-annual project entitled Retrospective Gestures. It addresses the question of how to present, document and make visible the dance history and physical heritage of dance to a wider audience. The objective is to enhance comprehension of the mechanisms through which knowledge, learning, and memories are transmitted within the physical continuum of dance. The project brings together artists, researchers, historians, and curators, as well as organisations and archives, to develop best practices for recording, documenting, and archiving intangible and tangible cultural heritage.

In Faberllull, Virve Sutinen will be writing about retrospectives that she has curated, including the mid-career retrospective of Finnish choreographer Sanna Kekäläinen (Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998) and La Ribot's retrospective Occupatzioone! (Tanz im August Berlin, 2010) which was a comprehensive review of her entire body of work up to that point.