Margrete Helgeby Chaney
With a career focused on performance, Margrete’s experience also extends to advocacy, project management, audience and membership engagement, and strategy and policy development in the arts.
Over a 20-year career, Margrete danced with West Australian Ballet, Chrissie Parrott Dance Company (Perth), Skadada (Perth) and Rambert Dance Company (London), and, with Stefan Karlsson, founded loaded and co.loaded.
In 2005, she was awarded Most Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer at the Australian Dance Awards. Margrete was named in the Best Individual Performer category by Dance Australia Critic’s Choice in 1998, 1999, 2001, and 2005, and was also nominated for several Green Room Awards and Australian Dance Awards.
Her professional roles have included lecturing in both Contemporary and Classical Dance at WAAPA; Assistant Director at Opera Queensland, State Opera of South Australia, and West Australian Opera; Director at West Australian Opera; Rehearsal Director at Buzz Dance Theatre (of which she later became Patron); Associate Producer at Performing Lines WA; Project Manager at Nova Ensemble; and Future Moves Project Facilitator.
Margrete is passionate about dancer wellbeing, career transition pathways, and the arts’ ability to deliver public good. In 2026, she is working privately with the Centre for Social Impact to begin mapping the performing arts sector in Western Australia.
Throughout her career, Margrete has served at national, state, and local levels on funding, awards, and strategic panels and boards, and in the 1980s, as a dancer representative for the West Australian MEAA. She was Chair of West Australian Ballet’s Artistic Review Panel from 2015 to 2018 and a member of the Helpmann Awards Dance and Physical Theatre Panel.
In 2014, Margrete was one of the inaugural members of the Board of The Contemporary Dance Company of WA (later to become Co3 Contemporary Dance Australia). She is the company’s current Chair, having previously held the roles of Chair of the Artistic Advisory Committee and, more recently, Deputy Chair.
Margrete holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees (WAAPA at Edith Cowan University and the University of Western Australia) and an MBA from the University of Western Australia.