Christopher House is a choreographer, performer, educator, mentor and sometime curator and editor. Born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, he joined Toronto Dance Theatre as a dancer in 1979 and was named a Resident Choreographer in 1981. He became the company’s Artistic Director in 1994, a position that he held for twenty-six years. He created more than sixty choreographies for TDT over a period of forty years, including a dozen full-length works, and has created work for many other organizations and individuals including Portugal’s Ballet Gulbenkian, the National Ballet of Canada, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Ballet British Columbia, Cirque du Soleil, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, The Newfoundland Dance Project, The Hidden Cameras and soloists Peggy Baker, Claudia Moore and Guillaume Côté. His works have been performed in nineteen countries worldwide; in 2018, his retrospective program House Mix was performed in fifteen Canadian cities coast to coast and in Bogotá and Medellin, Colombia. He left his position at TDT in August 2020 to focus on new aspects of his artistic practice and mentorship.

As a performer, Christopher has appeared in new works by Sarah Chase, Peter Chin, David Earle, Mark Morris, James Kudelka, and Peter Randazzo, among others. As a guest artist with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in the 1980s, he performed the title role in Fokine’s Petrushka, and danced in Kudelka’s In Paradisum, Nijinska’s Les Noces and in his solo Schubert Dances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He performed in Ame Henderson’s works voyager and RING; with Jordan Tannahill in their duet Marienbad (listed by NOW as one of the ten finest works of the decade), and in Deborah Hay’s Ten at Tanz im August in Berlin. In July 2025 he choreographed and performed as a collaborator on Young-jun Tak’s film Love Was Taught Last Friday, also in Berlin. His most recent solo performance work, New Tricks, premiered at The Citadel, Toronto, in March 2022 and has since been performed in St. John’s, Vancouver, Victoria, and Halifax. It was remounted in Toronto in May 2025.

For the last five years he has been engaged in reasearch as the curator of the exhibition Still With Us: Stories and HIV/AIDS and Dance in Canada, and as the editor of the accompanying publication coming in March 2026. Still With Us is an production of Dance Collection Danse.

Christopher has taught technique and creative practice across Canada and in the USA, UK, and The Netherlands. Since 2006, his teaching and directing have been influenced by his work with post-modern icon Deborah Hay; his performance of Hay's I'll Crane For You was named as one of the top five dance Canadian dance events of 2015 in the Globe and Mail. In the last several years, he has expanded his practice as mentor and facilitator, working with younger choreographers and leading workshops for established artists at the Banff Centre, the University of Calgary, Studio 303 in Montreal and in the Summer Love-In in Toronto. At TDT, he developed Creation Residency and Choreographic Research programs, and, in partnership with Ame Henderson, a biennial workshop for the development of choreographers called the Emerging Voices Project. In 2020-21 he designed and led two iterations of Creative Practice for Contemporary Dance online for the Banff Centre and co-led a Disability Informed Dance workshop with Debbie Patterson in Winnipeg.  

Christopher House was named an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre in 2007. He received the Muriel Sherrin Award for International Achievement in Dance in October 2009, was made an honorary doctor of letters by Memorial University in 2010, received the Silver Ticket Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2012 and was cited for Outstanding Achievement in the 2021 York University Alumni Awards. He was inducted into the Dance Collection Danse Hall of Fame in November 2024 and has been a Member of the Order of Canada since 2018.

Download Christopher’s full CV here

Christopher’s Wikipedia page here