Maria Bauman (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL now based in Brooklyn, NY. Maria earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance and English Literature from Florida State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Temple University. She’s been recognized with two Bessie Awards, one for her work with Black improvisers’ collective The Skeleton Architecture (2017) and another for her choreography as part of The Motherboard Suite directed by Saul Williams and Bill T. Jones (2021). She’s proud to be a recent fellow with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center. She was awarded two Maggie Allessee National Choreographic Center awards/residencies in 2022 and early 2023 to develop her work. Currently, Bauman is Artist-in-Residence at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, is a Mertz-Gilmore/NYFA dance award winner and is the Queer Exchange Network artist on behalf of BAAD! Maria’s prior work with Urban Bush Women and with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) are proud parts of her legacy and influences. Previously, she was a dancer with Urban Bush Women (UBW), and was UBW’s Director of Education and Community Engagement before becoming Associate Artistic Director. With PISAB, she has held many roles and is now a core trainer in Understanding & Undoing Racism. Bauman makes bold and honest artworks for her company MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. The primary question guiding Bauman’s artmaking and her life is “How can we BE Together, Better?” Organizing to undo racism informs her art-making and the two are folded together within her practice. In 2014, she co-founded a grassroots organization, Artists Co-creating Real Equity, which won the 2018 BAX Arts and Artists in Progress Award for working to undo racism in our daily lives. Centering the non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance studies to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence and equity. One of the premises she creates from is that we are each a collection of ancestors, an archive of spirits and experiences. She is developing a new outdoor artwork and accompanying ‘zine called These are the bodies that have not borne.
