Dagmara Bilon is a London-based interdisciplinary artist, bodyworker and co-founding director of The Purple Ladies, a women-led collective working across performance, socially engaged practice, and community-based arts.
Her work is grounded in somatic politics—an approach that understands the body not only as a site of artistic expression, but as a place where social conditions, trauma, care, migration, gender, and labour are lived and recorded. Through movement, touch, performance, and participatory practice, she explores how bodies carry history and how collective spaces can support forms of repair, agency, and relation. She describes her role in part as an “artistic doula”—a facilitator who supports the emergence of creative processes, collective practices, and embodied experiences. In this framing, the artist is not only a maker of work, but someone who holds space for others to reflect, create and transform. This includes working with communities through long-term engagement rather than isolated artistic outputs.
A graduate of Trinity LABAN (2003), her early practice begun in London’s experimental performance scene through performing in disused spaces, exploring chorographical and improvisation scores, as well as collaborative performance making, event organising and live art- research labs within Area 10 Project Space in Peckham (2003-2011). Bilon also co-founded Echo Space(2004-2006) a temporary performance venue in a disused church hall in Nunhead, which brought together performance, installation, and experimental artistic exchange within an adaptive, fluid and non-institutional setting.She has collaborated within immersive and experimental performance companies including Psychological Art Circus, Punchdrunk, Marissa Carnesky, Lundahl &Seitl, Ear Cinema and Himherandit Production, contributing to site-responsive and participatory works where audiences are often engaged within the performance environment. In 2007, she completed a postgraduate diploma in Dance Movement Therapy at the University of Roehampton. This training expanded her focus on the body as an archive of emotional, psychological, and social experience and deepened her engagement with psychoanalysis and clinical practice.
Bilon’s work has been presented in national and international contexts, including socially engaged platforms, festivals, and collaborations such as those with the Live Art Development Agency, Desperate Artwives, Procreate Project, The Genderhouse Fesival, Performance Platform, Horse Donkey, St Laurence and many more. Her practice consistently engages with feminism, migration, care, and lived experience through embodied and participatory methods. Across her work, she positions somatic and relational practice as both artistic method and political framework—where performance becomes a space of holding, witnessing, and collective transformation.
A central part of her practice is the co-creation of The Purple Ladies, developed following the closure of Area 10 and the death of collaborator Linda Dobell. What began as an artistic response to grief and structural change evolved into a fight towards building community, believing everyone can benefit from creativity in their lives. The Purple Ladies bring interdisciplinary and socially engaged programmes to South London, including free performances, movement sessions, and free community lunches to deprived wards, wanting creative experiences to be accessible to all. The organisation works in partnership with local authorities such as Lewisham and Southwark Councils and receives referrals through social prescribing systems and support organisations working with homelessness, domestic violence survivors, and marginalised communities. Supported by Arts Council England, councils, charities, and private funders, the collective operates at the intersection of art, care, and community infrastructure, particularly in areas affected by high levels of deprivation.