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. Their new project Super Nature premieres at the Walker Art Center in 2012.

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 MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University. She is certified teacher of  Body-Mind Centering®, shiatsu practitioner 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 co-curator of Public Art Saint Paul's Collaboratory, a artist/scientist initiative. She was the co-founder 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 was also the curator and producer of the Kinesthetic Kino: International Dance Cinema event that screened in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Wellington New Zealand 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, Movement Research, NYC, TanzLaboratorium, Kiev and dance companies, such as Axis Dance Company, California, and Young Dance, Minneapolis.