Corey Baker

Corey Baker is a New Zealand creative director, choreographer, filmmaker, and former dancer, born on 6 June 1990 in Christchurch. He grew up in the Hornby area and received his early education at Yaldhurst School before attending Ao Tawhiti school, at the time known as Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti.

Baker's path toward performance began in his early teens, when an English teacher who also ran a ballet class in central Christchurch noticed him tap dancing in a corridor and suggested that ballet training would support his ambitions in musical theatre. At fifteen, he left high school to enroll full time at the International Ballet Academy in Christchurch, where Carl Myers served as his lead instructor. His Broadway career began in 2009, when he appeared in Fela!, the acclaimed production that brought the life and music of Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti to the stage.

Baker has held the position of Resident Choreographer at the Royal New Zealand Ballet and Associate Artist of the Royal Albert Hall. In 2018, he created the first professional dance performance staged in Antarctica, which was filmed and broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom on Earth Day of that year. Two years later, he received a BBC Culture in Quarantine commission and remotely directed and choreographed Swan Lake Bath Ballet, a three-minute film featuring 27 elite ballet dancers performing in their homes during COVID-19 lockdowns. Released in July 2020, the film accumulated over four million views within a month and went on to win the 2021 Prix Italia award for web fiction.

In 2021, Baker directed two dance films centered on climate justice: Blown, made for the BBC, and Leaders of a New Regime, which incorporated a track of the same name by Lorde. His commission Dance Race aired on BBC3 in March 2022 as part of the broadcaster's Dance Passion season. That same year, Baker served as chief choreographer and movement director for the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. In 2023, he took on the role of creative director for the United Nations Human Rights 75 Concert held in Geneva.

Baker's screen credits span a wide range of projects. He choreographed The Dead Dance for Lady Gaga, a piece originally created for season two of Netflix's Wednesday and subsequently used in the music video for the single. He also choreographed Julianne Nicholson's Dance Mom sequence in season four of Hacks, as well as contributing to Strictly Come Dancing, RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under, Joe Lycett vs the Oil Giant, and The National Lottery's Paralympics GB Homecoming. His advertising work includes campaigns for O2 with Dua Lipa, Marks & Spencer, and EE. Baker served as choreographer on Tim Burton's 2024 film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and as movement director for the music video accompanying Lola Young's 2025 single One Thing. From 2018 to 2020, Baker was in a relationship with American actor Jonathan Groff.