Jérôme Bel lives in Paris, he works worldwide.
His first piece, a choreography of objects, is entitled name given by the author (1994). The second one, Jérôme Bel (1995), is based on the identity and the total nudity of the four performers. The third one, Shirtology (1997) presents an actor wearing many shop-bought T-shirts. The last performance (1998), which in quoting several times a solo by the German choreographer Susanne Linke, and also Hamlet or André Agassi, tries to define an ontology of the performance. The piece Xavier Le Roy (2000) was claimed by Jérôme Bel as his own, but was actually made by the choreographer Xavier Le Roy. The show must go on (2001) brings toghether a cast of twenty performers, nineteen pop songs and one DJ. In 2004, he was invited to produce a piece for the Paris Opera ballet : Véronique Doisneau (2004), a theatrical documentary on the work of the dancer Véronique Doisneau, from the ballet corps of that company. Isabel Torres (2005) for the ballet of the Teatro Municipal of Rio de Janeiro is the Brazilian version of the production for the Paris Opera. Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005) is created in Bangkok with the Thai traditional dancer Pichet Klunchun. In 2009, he produces Cédric Andrieux (2009), dancer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and then at the Lyon Opera Ballet. In 2010, he creates with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker 3Abschied (2010), a performance based on The song of the Earth by Gustav Malher. In 2012, he produces Disabled Theater (2012), a piece with a Zurich-based company, Theater Hora, consisting of professional actors with learning disabilities. In Cour d'honneur (2013) he stages fourteen spectators at the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes within the Avignon Festival. In Gala (2015), the choreographer stages together professional people from the dance field and amateurs coming from different backgrounds. In Tombe (2016), performance created at the invitation of Opéra National de Paris, Jérôme Bel proposed to some dancers of the ballet to invite, for a duet, the person with who they would never share the stage. Posé arabesque, temps lié en arrière, marche, marche (2017) is a piece for all the dancers of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon based on the famous "Entrance of the shadows" of the ballet La Bayadère. Dancing as if nobody is watching (2018) and the reading of the Lecture on nothing by John Cage call for a contemplative aesthetic attitude. With Retrospective, Jérôme Bel goes back through his video archives and makes a cross section within his corpus, to better bring out the linkage between dance and politics. Isadora Duncan (2019) paints a picture of this choreographer.
Since 2019, for ecological reasons, Jérôme Bel and his company no longer travel by plane for creations and tours. Thus, Dances for Wu-Kang Chen (2020), a portrait of this Taiwanese dancer, Xiao Ke (2020), a performance created with this Shanghai-based choreographer, and Laura Pante (2020), which presents the career of this dancer living in Italy, were all rehearsed by videoconference. These pieces are performed in the language of each dancer and tour in their respective countries. Jérôme Bel worked on his auto-bio-choreo-graphy Jérôme Bel (2021), with the idea that it would be performed abroad by an actor in the language of his or her country, using a protocol, script and videos. For Dances for an actress (Valérie Dréville) (2020) and Dans voor actrice (Jolente de Keersmaeker) (2021), Jérôme Bel asked these two actresses to interpret, not the roles of the theatrical repertoire as they are used to, but rather certain dances from the choreographic modernity. Non human dances (2023), conceived with the art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual, analyses the relationship between the history of Western dance and the non-human in order to enrich our understanding of it.
The films of his shows are presented in contemporary art biennials and in many museums. In 2016, he created MoMA Dance Company, performed by some of the staff members of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jérôme Bel received a Bessie Award for the performances of The show must go on in New York in 2005. In 2008 Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun received the Routes Princess Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity (European Cultural Foundation) for Pichet Klunchun and myself (2005). In 2013, Disabled Theater (2012) was selected for the Theatertreffen in Berlin and won the Swiss Dance Awards - Current Dance Works. En 2021, Jérôme Bel and Wu-Kang Chen received the Taishin Performing Arts Award for the performance Dances for Wu-Kang Chen. In 2013 Emails 2009-2010, written with the French choreographer Boris Charmatz, is edited (Les Presses du Réel). This book is published on line and in English, still by Les Presses du Réel, in 2016.