James Cunningham

James Cunningham is an Australian performance, movement, animation, and networked performance artist whose practice explores bodily perception, performativity, and the relationship between self, environment, objects, and others. Drawing from a background in dance and live art, his work spans participatory performance, animation, photo-media, installation, and durational walking practices in both built and natural environments.

A graduate in Dance Performance from the Centre for the Performing Arts in 1988, he served as co-artistic director of Igneous Inc. from 1997 to 2025. With Igneous, he choreographed and performed in stage productions, performance installations, video-dance works, and networked performances presented internationally at festivals and venues including Nuit Blanche Toronto, BIAM Paris, and Theater Der Welt.

Since 2007, Cunningham has developed a durational stillness and conscious walking practice that informs his live performances, workshops, animations, and photo-media works. His practice focuses on presence, deliberate action, and heightened awareness of the body’s relationship to surrounding environments. Through slow, mindful walking in creeks, wetlands, laneways, and urban spaces, he investigates temporality, embodiment, and environmental perception, often finding significance in overlooked everyday locations rather than spectacular landscapes.

As an artist with disability, Cunningham’s work is shaped by chronic nerve pain, upper-limb paralysis, and bodily asymmetry. For more than three decades, he has integrated the movement qualities of his paralysed arm into dance, live art, and video art practices, while durational stillness and ultra-slow walking have emerged as both creative methodologies and responses to pain management. His work frequently examines presence, time, minutiae, and the interaction between body and environment.

Alongside his artistic practice, Cunningham facilitates workshops that share techniques for embodied presence developed through conscious walking practices. These workshops explore breath, gravity, micro-movement, perception, relaxation, and the shifting relationship between body, identity, and environment, while also considering how conscious walking can expose and subvert the influence of capitalism within urban spaces.

Internationally, Cunningham has undertaken residencies, performances, and exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and North America. In 2026, he was featured in the Vids at Heart international video-art festival, where his work Arsläjans was screened nightly on an 11-metre-wide LED screen at Munich’s House of Communication. In 2025, he completed a six-week residency at Das KloHäuschen, creating the performance installation Fine Line. In 2023, he presented a participatory performance at the symposium Walking Is Still Honest: About Being and Walking Together in Vilnius, undertook a residency with the Walking As Practice program at Björkö Konstnod, and exhibited in the group exhibition 5 in Brussels.

He has received numerous fellowships and residencies, including a Copeland Fellowship at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts, a Fellowship at the Australian Choreographic Centre, and an Asialink Residency in India.

His immersive audio-photo slideshow works are available through evidenceearthexisted.vhx.tv.