Dr. Hanna Poikonen is originally from Finland but science and movement practise have brought her to live in Australia, Switzerland, Singapore and Costa Rica. For several years already, she is based in Barcelona which is a fascinating hub for arts, wellness and technology.
Since her early teenage, she was dedicating to science and movement practice. She started from the urban dance styles, such as locking and break dance, and jazz dance, and continued through modern to contemporary dance training with Guillermo Weickert, Julien Hamilton, Sam Coren, Rakesh Sukesh, Tero Saarinen Company and Francisco Córdova Azuela among others, and in dance spaces such as La Caldera, Barcelona; Gibney Dance, New York City, and Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique, Montreal. Explorations in kung fu, tai chi, butoh and somatic methods over the years 2013-2018 taught her another holistic approach to the body-mind entity (Movement Research, New York City; Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima and Atsushi Takenouchi among others).
With WiseMotion, Hanna has toured in Europe (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; Technical University Berlin; Sanitas Mayores, Barcelona and Madrid, Kuopio Dance Festival, Balettakademien Stockholm, Synergy The Retreat Show), North America (Harvard Medical School, Boston; Gibney Dance NYC) and Asia (IRIS Hong Kong).
When starting her university studies, the function of the human body, the brain in particular, caught Hanna’s interest. The imaging methods of EEG, fMRI, PET, and TMS fascinated her, as well as the theoretical background of bioelectromagnetism which presented simplified models to understand the continuous and overlapping flow of electromagnetic information within us.
In 2011, she completed a versatile Master’s degree in the Aalto University School of Science, Finland dedicating to biomedical engineering, neuroscience, art theory, and intercultural communication. She also studied Post Graduate of Art Therapy in Metáfora, Barcelona in 2011-2012. In the Guest Research Program of MACBA Barcelona in 2011, she wrote a dissertation “The Post-War Art – A Neuroscientific Analysis”. She defended her PhD dissertation “Dance on Cortex – ERPs and Phase Synchrony in Dancers and Musicians during a Contemporary Dance Piece” in May 2018 (Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki). Since 2019, she works as a postdoc researcher at ETH Zurich focusing on higher education, expertise and brain research and at Örebro University Hospital with creative movement and mental health.
Outside of science and movement practise, she loves to spend time with the family and friends, learn about different cultures, eat well, and have adventures in the raw nature from tropics to the arctic zone.