Yola Yulfianti

Yola Yulfianti is a choreographer, director and interdisciplinary artist based in Jakarta, Indonesia. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Dance from the Jakarta Institute of the Arts (IKJ) in 2004, followed by a Master’s in Urban Arts at the same institution. Her work of a dance film titled Suku Yola (“Yola’s Tribe”), a personal exploration of self-fashioned identity as a response to essentialist identity claims. The film received the Pearls Winner Award at the Internationale Tanz Film Pool Festival in Berlin (2012). Yola later completed her doctoral studies at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts Surakarta in 2017. Since that she’s became lecture at Jakarta Institute of The Arts and on this year 2025 initiated Jakarta Dance Hub.
Yola composes her own music and visual elements to accompany her performances. Her artistic process does not focus solely on finished works or conventional art formats, but on the embodied experience of navigating urban reality. Her work spans dance, performance, film, and installation often engaging with themes of the body, identity, memory, and social space.
Over the past four years, Yola has been actively involved in Translocal Performative Academy, an international platform for performance research and exchange initiated by Claudia Bosse. Through this program, she has participated in long-term collaborations engaging with artists and researchers between Europe and Asia in context-based, site-responsive explorations.
Her work has been presented at major venues and festivals such as Teater Jakarta, Galeri Nasional, Salihara, the Jakarta Biennale, Indonesian Dance Festival, ArtJog and international platforms including the Kinani Biennale (Mozambique), Attakkalari Biennale (India), and Lasalle’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (Singapore)
As a director and choreographer, she has created over 30 performances, Yola’s recent works demonstrate her evolving interest in emotional vulnerability, urban identity, and experimental performance language. Longing You (2024) explores themes of longing and memory through restrained movement and visual minimalism. In Tuti in the City (2023), she portrays a female urban figure negotiating the complexities of Jakarta’s social fabric, combining gesture, voice, and multimedia. Her latest work, TOLOLARTHA TRAMTOXS KARERAATOLA L AI LA UH (2024), departs into a poetic and surreal terrain, using invented language, absurdist choreography, and ritualistic performance to access intuitive and subconscious layers of expression.
Her strong engagement with dance film has resulted in over 15 experimental short works—Kampung Melayu Pasar Senen PP, Tanah, Air, Udara, Aku dan Kamu, Outer Space, and #Cobacobafilter, among others, where she investigates narratives of movement, crisis, and intimacy.
In addition to her performance and film work, Yola is active in contemporary art exhibitions. Her projects have been shown in ArtJog, Galeri Semarang, Bentara Budaya Jakarta, and various international art spaces. Notable exhibitions include Sembilan Puluh Sembilan Persen Mamak Mamak, Arsip Seblang, and Suku Yola Scrapbook.
With over two decades of experience in the field, Yola Yulfianti continues to be a significant voice in Indonesia’s contemporary performance scene, drawing from personal, political, and urban experience to bridge body, space, and collective memory.

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