Olive’s work focuses on the body both as an objective physical process and as a subjective lived experience through dance, film, installation, pedagogy and curatorial practice. Her site and context specific work investigates the physical resonance of space in urban, domestic, wild, technological and social landscapes.

As co-director of the BodyCartography Project with partner Otto Ramstad, Olive has toured across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia and South America. They have just completed a new work titled ½ Life that culminated from five years of research into the cultural, scientific, geographical and historical metasite of the nuclear Pacific.

Olive grew up in the art galleries and on the beaches of New Zealand. She trained with first and second generation Judson Church choreographers at the European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and NYC, critical theory at Dartington College and new media at Long Island University. She is certified practitioner of  Body-Mind Centering®, shiatsu and is a DanceAbility® teacher. She has collaborated with numerous artists and has appeared in the work of choreographers Deborah Hay, Yoshiko Chuma, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen Nelson, Jennifer Monson, Eva Karczag and Stephanie Skura.

She is the cofounder and curator of SEEDS Festival, Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science, an interdisciplinary arts and ecology festival, which began in 2008 at Earthdance in Massachusetts. She is currently developing a new artist scientist initiative with Public Art St Paul. She co-organized the West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival, Berkeley, CA in 1999. She was also the curator and producer of the Kinesthetic Kino: International Dance Cinema event that screened in Minneapolis, California and beyond between 2003-2007.

Since 1995 Olive has been teaching dance, video and Body-Mind Centering® internationally in university contexts, and public contexts such as Impulstanz, Vienna and Movement Research, NYC and dance companies, such as Axis Dance Company from California.