CONTACT & BIO

My work happens at the intersection of writing and movement. I am a poet and dancer with a practice rooted in recitation, writing, choreographing and improvisation. I write, and I dance and I often work interdisciplinarily choreographing from the words of a poem and/or translating movement phrases into speech and text. My work explores how words are bodies too: with speed, and levels, and shape and size, (making images), and how language is communicated with the body. A turn and a turn of phrase mean the same thing but in different forms. The space of overlap where arranging lines in a stanza becomes like arranging steps of movement is where I anchor my approach, talking/writing/thinking about how I move as much as I connect my movement to how I’m thinking/talking/writing for performance. I am interested in storytelling in poetic and dance forms and too, imagining how words, gestures, and sounds/vibrations combine to tell.

I work as a writer exploring rhythms, patterns and qualities of speech through both the written word and a developing choreographic praxis.

My work has been presented at Links Hall (Chicago, IL), Elastic Arts (Chicago, IL), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), Compound Yellow (Oak Park, IL), 99¢ Plus Gallery (NYC), Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), and with Espiral Danza (Antigua & Guatemala City, Guatemala).

My work has also appeared in The Black Arts Quarterly (now the International Review of African American Art) a publication of Stanford University, and The Performance Response Journal. Maya’s self published chapbooks are called: Places Where We Can Imagine, and Planets, Gourds and Traveling Staffs.