Maria Bauman

Brooklyn-based MBDance Artistic Director Maria Bauman is a Bessie Award-winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL. She creates bold and honest artworks based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. She draws on her studies of English literature, Capoeira, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs, and concert dance training to embody interconnectedness, joy, and tenacity. She is also a community organizer and co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity). Organizing to undo racism informs her artmaking and the two are folded together within her practice.  

Bauman founded MBDance in 2009. After dancing with and serving as Director of Education and Community Engagement and then Associate Artistic Director for Urban Bush Women, she began creating dance works as a freelance choreographer. Bauman formed her company to further amplify her unique creative perspective and to support dancers in honing a particular blend of physical risk and athleticism, Capoeira-esque floorwork and spatiality, emphasis on race and equity, and willingness to investigate intimacy in various forms.  

Currently, Bauman is a Mertz-Gilmore/NYFA dance award winner and the Queer Exchange Network artist on behalf of BAAD! She is developing a new outdoor artwork called These are the bodies that have not borne. She was recently a Rankin Fellow at Drexel University, where she stewarded a community-engaged performative installation called Womb: The Black Wealth Project. She also recently completed choreography with musician Saul Williams and director Bill T. Jones for New York Live Arts (The Motherboard Suite) and for her own company with the Delaware Art Museum.  

Bauman and MBDance held their first QTPOC Sankofa Dreaming festival in Summer 2022. It was a weekend festival of workshops and performance centering Black queer art for a multi-generational cohort of 12 queer and/or transgender Brooklynites of color, based on themes from MBDance’s Desire: A Sankofa Dream. In what will now be an annual community engagement, QTPOC in Brooklyn built community, discovered their own power through performance practice workshops, and were centered in performance and curricula that lifts up the histories of queer makers of color.