About Me

Ashlee Barton is an Australian dance artist, researcher, and educator based in Naarm (Melbourne). Working across live and digital performance, her practice explores how female and queer subjectivities are shaped, witnessed, and continually re-presented through movement. Drawing on her training at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and her practice-based PhD in Dance from Deakin University, Ashlee is committed to foregrounding the body (in live and mediated forms) as a site of critical inquiry, poetic resistance and expression, approaching dance as a space for rigorous thinking and embodied knowledge.

As an artist researcher, Ashlee creates improvisation-driven works that unfold through the emergence of spatial and temporal structures that are repeated over long periods of time, which intersect with subtle negotiations of being seen. Her choreography often emerges from fragments of text or embodied questions expanding into performance structures that illuminate tensions between vulnerability and agency. Working across theatre, gallery, and digital contexts, she investigates how the performing body can articulate forms of resistance that open up the nuances of the socio-political body.

As an educator, Ashlee’s teaching integrates studio and practice-based modes of learning with historical and theoretical enquiry, supporting students to develop technical, artistic, reflexive, and analytical capacities from embodied knowledge and understanding. Currently a Teaching Fellow in dance at Deakin University, her teaching practice spans contemporary dance technique, improvisation, composition, film-based dance practices, dance history and theory, and creative practice research enquiry across undergraduate and Honours level study. She approaches dance training with a balance between technical rigour and creativity, fostering environments of mutual respect and care, where students are supported to take creative risks, reflect critically, and discover their own artistic contributions to contemporary dance.