English choreographer Wayne McGregor was BOTD in 1970. Born in Stockport, Manchester to a Scottish working-class family, he began dance classes aged 7 and studied dance at Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire and the José Limon School in New York. He returned to London in 1992, founding his own company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance and becoming choreographer-in-residence at The Place. Admired for the sharpness and speed of his choreography, he was an early adopter of digital technology, setting his dancers against digitally-created landscapes or interact with digitally-created figures onstage. In his 1997 piece 53 Bytes, dancers in Berlin and Canada performed simultaneously and were watched by audiences in both countries by live satellite link. In 2006, he was appointed resident choreographer of the English Royal Ballet, becoming the first non-classical choreographer to hold the post. His productions Qualia, Engram and Chroma were hugely successful, significantly expanding the company’s audience demographic. In 2009, McGregor directed and choreographed a double bill of the operas Acis and Galatea and Dido and Aeneas, combining performers from the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera. His most popular works include Woolf Works, based on the writings of Virginia Woolf and with a score by Max Richter, and MaddAddam, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel. McGregor has created work for the Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, New York City Ballet, Australian Ballet, Zurich Ballet, English National Ballet and Rambert Dance Company, and directed operas for La Scala in Milan. Outside the world of theatre, he has choreographed for the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, music videos for alt-rock band Radiohead and created a public dance work for London’s 2012 Olympic Festival. He has also collaborated with medical scientists and researchers to map the physical functions of the human heart and the process of creative cognition. In 2015, he was awarded a knighthood for his services to dance. Openly gay since forever, he lives with his long-term partner, the dancer and choreographer Antoine Vereecken.