Maria Bauman-Morales is a Bessie-Award-winning, Brooklyn, NY-based, multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL. Bauman-Morales is also a sought-after facilitator and public speaker on the topics of social justice practices within performing arts, embodied and arts-based leadership development, and racial equity in the arts. She creates bold and honest artworks for her company MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and fascination with intimacy. Bauman brings the same tenets to organizing to undo racism in the arts and beyond with ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), the grassroots organizing body she co-founded six years ago with Sarita Covington and Nathan Trice. In particular, Bauman’s dance work centers the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of queer people of color in performative practices, using dance as the wheel from which multiple other genres including visual art, text, and song are spokes. MBDance centers people of color, both ideas and bodies, in performance without tragedizing or tokenizing them. Bauman-Morales draws on her long study of capoeira, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs, as well as concert dance classes to embody interconnectedness, joy, and tenacity.

Photo by Scott Shaw