Marie-Zoe Buchholz aka ZOE is a freelance, interdisciplinary performance artist, project manager and curator from Düsseldorf. In her artistic work she reflects on rehabilitation, transformation and the appropriation of body and space and the relationship between power and marginalization. The inclusion, visibility and empowerment of structurally discriminated people and their stories are the focus of their work. She was introduced to dance and music at an early age and received encouragement and training in various classical and urban performing arts including hip hop, house, jazz dance, contemporary dance as well as jazz and choral singing and classical piano. During her A-levels her contact with stage and dance intensified and between 2007 and 2009 she produced her first own pieces of music and performances within the Düsseldorf ist ARTig format. In 2008 she came into contact with the dance style voguing and later with the ballroom culture, which has had a lasting impact on her art and stage language to this day. ZOE belongs to the first generation of voguing performers in Germany and is considered one of the leading figures for ballroom culture in German-speaking countries. She was a member of the House of Melody (now the House of Saint Laurent), the first German Ballroom House, which established the scene in Germany and was co-founded by ZOE.

Since 2012, ZOE has worked on various productions and events. Together with the House of Melody, she initiated workshops, events and festival formats in the Düsseldorf and Berlin area, including Ladies Attack (2014) and BattleRoom (2015/16) at tanzhaus NRW, The Shakespeare Ball (2016) at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Berlin Voguing Out ( Prince Charles, HAU 2014 - 2016). Following her work in the House of Melody, her first theater residencies and engagements followed in 2017 with the renowned choreographer and director Stephanie Thiersch/MOUVOIR, among others. 2017 - 2019 ZOE performed as a member of the Jitta Collective in Chombotrope, a German-Kenyan production (MOUVOIR) dealing with post-colonialism and the dynamics of cultural appropriation. Chombotrope toured internationally and was awarded the Cologne Dance Prize in 2017. During the same period, ZOE became a protégé of New York jazz and gospel luminary Onita Boone.

From 2021 up to and including 2022, ZOE was be researching in the programs DISTANZEN of the Dachverband Tanz and #TakeCare and #TakeHeart, funded by the performing arts fund at tanzhaus NRW. In 2021 she was appointed a member of the Ethics Council of the Dachverband Tanz. She is also an active member of the Community of Practice at tanzhaus NRW and a mentor of the Re:Vision X program of the Fonds Sozio Kultur. In 2022, ZOE received the first Community Legacy Award from the German Ballroom Community as well as the "Performing Arts" sponsorship award from the state capital of Düsseldorf for her artistic work.

In 2022 ZOE became a mother for the first time. She lives with her partner and their daughter in Düsseldorf.

In 2019, ZOE began to increasingly devote herself to her own work, not only staging performatively but also as artistic director. Triggered by the global Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, ZOE conceived the performance Black Magic - a homage to black trans women for the Britney X Festival 2020 at the Schauspiel Koeln. Later in the year the performances Feminine Fragments followed for the reopening of the HAU in Berlin and FEMINA SAGA - a ritual journey, the first full-length production, co-produced by tanzhaus NRW.

In addition to stage and festival productions, ZOE travels throughout Europe as a lecturer, moderator and speaker for lectures, panel discussions and with its own workshop formats. With the Shapes&Shades collective, which she co-founded, she curated the "Shapes&Shades - taking up space" project in 2021, a series of events and discourses in cooperation with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. The project serves to promote and establish ballroom culture in NRW in order to make it accessible to predominantly marginalized and structurally discriminated people.