Juliet Burnett

Indonesian-Australian Juliet Burnett was born in Sydney. She is one of Australia’s most recognised dancers after her years at The Australian Ballet, where the roles of Giselle and Odette in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake and abstract classical works became her signature, as well as her versatility in the contemporary repertory of choreographers such as Wayne McGregor and Jiri Kylian. For a couple of years she freelanced, working with contemporary choreographers and guesting with Chunky Move, Dutch National Ballet and West Australian Ballet, and then in 2016 joined Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in Belgium, where she has danced the repertory of Pina Bausch, Alain Platel, William Forsythe and Trisha Brown amongst others, and had creations made on her by Édouard Lock and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

Her work in her mother’s country of Indonesia includes performing contemporary and classical work, master classes for local ballet students and in 2015 founding a series of community workshops for underprivileged children called Ballet Goes To… in collaboration with Ballet.Id and the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. Juliet has been trained in her grandmother’s art of Javanese classical dance, and other traditional Javanese dances and art forms including the martial art of Pencak Silat.

As a choreographer she co-created a dance film Letting Blood for Dark Mofo (2016), choreographed and performed in a music clip for Melbourne indie band Cool Explosions (2018), and a dance theatre work in situ (2019) for Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, featuring actor-dancer Victor Polster and gamelan music by Will Guthrie. She is currently in creation for her new dance theatre based work Kasekten in collaboration with heavy metal musicians Karina Utomo and Rama Parwata, and installation artist Michaela Gleave.

In her practice Juliet explores a hybrid of Javanese dance and arts with Western classical and contemporary forms, navigating the confluence of dance, theatre and music.

In 2021 Juliet was named winner of the Arts and Culture category of the 40 Under 40 Most Influential Asian-Australian Awards. She is currently completing a Master in Leadership online at Deakin University.

Juliet is founder and director of A_PART and is passionate about the role of art as a mirror to the world we live in.