Dagmara Bilon is a London-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, facilitator, and co-founding director of The Purple Ladies, a women-led collective and Community Interest Company 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, 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 create, transform, and participate. This includes working with communities through long-term engagement rather than isolated artistic outputs.
A graduate of Trinity Laban (2003), she developed her early practice in London’s experimental performance scene through choreography, improvisation, and collaborative research within spaces such as Area 10 Project Space in Peckham. Her work evolved through interdisciplinary methods combining performance, writing, drawing, object-making, and facilitation.
She has collaborated within immersive and experimental performance contexts including Punchdrunk, Marissa Carnesky, and Psychological Art Circus, Lundahl &Seitl, Ear Cinema and Himerandit Production-contributing to site-responsive and participatory works where audiences are often physically and sensorially engaged within the performance environment.
Bilon also co-founded Echo Space, a temporary performance venue in a disused church hall, which brought together performance, installation, and experimental artistic exchange within an adaptive, non-institutional setting.
In 2007, she completed a postgraduate diploma in Dance Movement Therapy at the University of Roehampton. This training deepened her engagement with somatic practice, expanding her focus on the body as an archive of emotional, psychological, and social experience.
A central part of her practice is the formation 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 long-term collective and, in 2022, a registered Community Interest Company.
Through The Purple Ladies, she leads interdisciplinary and socially engaged programmes in South London, including free movement sessions, participatory workshops, and community-based creative projects. 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.
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 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.