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Friederike “Frieda” Frost is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar working at the intersection of Breaking, artistic research, and cultural practice. A Kunststiftung NRW artistic research fellow, she is currently completing her PhD on Breaking at the German Sport University Cologne. Drawing on her experience as a breaker, her research explores artistic expression and identity, transnational flows, and cultural influences within Breaking, with publications on gender negotiations, belonging, call and response and artistic research.
As a dancer and choreographer, Frost creates performance and dance-theatre works with her collective nutrospektif (Germany) and her company Cie Chara (Morocco). A former Factory Artist at tanzhaus nrw, she has performed at Opera Cologne, Schauspiel Köln, Tanz NRW Festival, and Pottporus Festival Herne. Her work has been supported by research residencies at AGORA / Montpellier Danse, Scène nationale Carré-Colonnes, and Grand Studio Brussels, and presented internationally at festivals including On Marche (Marrakech), Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Casablanca, Urban Essentials (Lithuania), and Tanz NRW Festival (Cologne).
Known internationally as Bgirl Frost, she has had a successful career as a competitive breaker and is an active judge at major international Breaking competitions, including the Olympic Games Paris 2024, the Olympic Qualifier Series Shanghai 2024, and the Asian Championships 2025.
Biopgraphy
Born in 1984 and growing up in Berlin-Kreuzberg, Frieda Frost discovered hiphop culture in the early 2000s, starting breaking in 2002. Dancing became the focus point in her work and life. She studied sports management at the German Sport University in Cologne and worked as professional dancer and performer for (dance) theatre projects with e.g. Pottporus e.V./Renegade, Schauspielhaus Köln or Oper Köln, was Factory Artist at the tanzhaus nrw (2020-2022), teached classes and workshops in informal and formal institutions like youth clubs, schools, dance schools, and universities; earning her the Digital Teaching Award for her class "Breaking for School" at the German Sport University Cologne. She is invited as keynote speaker, lecturer or scientific commeetee member for academic conferences; from 2020-2023 she was working as cultural manager for the Goethe-Institut Marokko in Rabat, Morocco.
As "Bgirl Frost", her competition career led her to participate and win numerous national and international breaking events (e.g. BOTY Bgirl Battle, Eurobattle, vice-champion Germany 2007, 2019 and Morocco 2022), leading in becoming a certified judge for international breaking competitions. Today, she is judging national and international dance events (e.g. Swedish Championships, LCB Battle, Undisputed Qualifications) and is a certified WDSF judge, judging e.g. in the Olympic Games 2024 in Paris, WDSF Breaking for Gold competitions or the Olympic Qualifier Series (2024) and Asian Games (2025) in Shanghai.
Building on her knowledge as dancer, Frieda
Frost explores hiphop and dance not only in the studio or battle stage, but also in academic discourse. She is currently a Kunststiftung NRW reserach fellow and worked as assistant researcher at the Cologne HipHop
Institute at the University of Cologne (2023-2025) and assistant researcher
at the Institute of Dance and Movement Culture at the German Sport
University Cologne (2014-2018). She publishes articels and contributes to books (see researchgate and publications in this blog) and established the format @hiphopstudysunday on Instagram to share (academic) knowledge on dance and hiphop culture.
With teaching beeing one of her passions, Frieda Frost developed an cultural specific teaching approach for teaching Breaking in (in)formal education settings that is influenced by her expreriences in the urban dance scene, teaching at universities, contemporary and dance theatre contexts and her sport studies background. This approach is focusing on an individual, creative and collective learning space, with re-creating the cultural spaces of urban dance like the cypher or concepts like each-one-teach-one. In 2020, she received the Digital Teaching Award of the German Sport University Cologne and recently published a bookchapter about her teaching concepts.
As cultural manager, Frieda Frost realises projects, expositions and festivals such as NADAR'ART (2022), Streetperspektif (2017) or creates and implements dance mentoring programms such as DANCE FUSION MOROCCO (2021-2022).
For references within teaching, judging, battles etc. see REFERENCES