Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (born 1973 in Antwerp, Belgium, to a Colombian father and Belgian mother) is a Belgian-Colombian choreographer who has created works for over fifty international ballet and contemporary dance companies. She trained at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp and danced with several European companies before moving into full-time choreography in 2003. Her work is known for its bold theatrical imagination, humour, and willingness to tackle subject matter that is politically or socially engaged. Among her most celebrated pieces are A Streetcar Named Desire (2012), Frida (2016), and Scheherazade. For Northern Ballet she created Gentleman Jack (2025), a full-length ballet based on the life of Anne Lister, the nineteenth-century Yorkshire landowner and diarist whose same-sex relationships brought her the nickname 'Gentleman Jack'. The production received its world premiere in Leeds in spring 2025.