Helly Minarti is a Jakarta-born who in 2018 relocated to Yogyakarta where she continues working as independent-, itinerant dance scholar/curator, rethinking radical strategies to connect practice and theory. Her research interest is on historiographies of choreography as discursive practice vis-á-vis the eclectic knowledges that infuse our understanding of human body and nature. She worked as Head of Arts for theBritish Council Indonesia (2001-03) which set her off to curating. Her curatorial projects include 2nd Asia-Europe Dance Forum, Eurasia: Mis/understanding (2004), three editions of Indonesian Dance Festival (IDF 2014, 2016 and 2018). In 2020, she was one of the international curators for TPAM: Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama.

Helly's most recent curatorial project is Jejak-旅Tabi Exchange: Wandering Asian Contemporary Performance (jejak-tabi.org), an exchange platform designed to intimately connect two cities in Asia through a set of curatorial questions with the intention to go in-depth into certain context and locality. It has connected Yogyakarta (Indonesia) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) in 2018 and Roxas City (the Philippines) and Naha (Okinawa) in 2020 and 2021. She has been involved in various exchange arts projects, forums/conferences,and granted research fellowships in Asia, Europe and the US. Helly earned a Ph.D in dance studies from University of Roehampton (UK). She is a recipient of the British Chevening Award, Asia Fellows Scholarship, Asian Cultural Council and most recently the US-ASEAN Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship. In 2019, she set up LINGKARAN | koreografi, a collaborative research platform aiming to expand the critical notions of choreography beyond its dance realm. She occasionally guest-lectures, among them at Universitas Sanata Dharma (Yogyakarta), the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts, University of Melbourne and at Taipei National University of the Arts.