Sheena McGrandles is an Irish choreographer and performer based in Berlin. Originally from Northern Ireland, she grew up in a working-class family with little access to dance training, learning ballet from books and television before securing a place at the Laban Centre London. She later completed the MA Solo Dance Authorship (SODA) at HZT / UdK Berlin with an excellence scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation and was selected for the eight-month residency at K3, Kampnagel.

Since 2010, she has lived and worked in Berlin. Her practice is hybrid and extends beyond the stage, encompassing choreography, performance, teaching, mentoring, curating, and long-term collaborative and infrastructural work. Alongside her artistic practice, she is active in artist-led collectives such as PSR and neue häute / agora, which develop grassroots, non-hierarchical spaces for body-based practices and local exchange.

Choreographically, her work is driven by a strong commitment to form, precision, and virtuosity, with a long-term focus on radical temporality. She investigates how bodies and movement can be slowed down, suspended, or hyper-edited to draw attention to moments of in-between and to transform the everyday into choreography. This research informs the series Radical Temporalities & Illogical Intimacies, including FIGURED (2019), FLUSH (2020), ANYONETHING (2023), and as long as you want (2024), which premiered at HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

In parallel, Sheena has developed an autobiographical strand of work engaging with large theatrical genres. This includes DAWN: A Musical on Reproduction (2021), MINT: An Opera on Money (2024), and TOIL (2025). TOIL examines the dancing body as labour and longing, drawing on ballet, Irish folk, and punk to explore work as an emotional, physical, and collective condition.

Her work is shown nationally and internationally and has been invited twice to Tanzplattform Deutschland (2020, 2022). Since 2024, Sheena is receiving structural funding (Basisförderung), supporting her sustained artistic research and long-term collaborations.