The Company

Maria Bauman founded MBDance in 2009. MBDance creates honest and bold art from a sense of physical and emotional power, an insistence on equity, and a fascination with intimacy and relationship. In particular, MBDance centers the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of queer people of color onstage, using dance as the wheel whose spokes are multiple other genres including visual art, text, and song.

After dancing with as well as serving as Director of Education Community Engagement and then Associate Artistic Director for Urban Bush Women, Bauman had been creating dance works as a freelance choreographer. She formed her company to further amplify her unique creative point of view and to support dancers in honing the 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 that Bauman’s work excels within.

MBDance recently premiered (re)Source for four sold-out nights via co-commission between The Chocolate Factory and BAAD!. Among other honors, MBDance is a current BRIClab and Redtail Arts awarded resident company and Bauman is one of only a handful of choreographers across the nation who are honored as Urban Bush Women National Choreographic Center Fellows. MBDance has also earned 2017-19 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence, CUNY Dance Initiative Residency Awards in both 2014 and 2015, Harlem Stage Funds for New Work via The Jerome Foundation in both 2013-14 and 2009-10, a 2010-11 Dance Theater Workshop (now NYLA) Studio Series and Art Mill creative residencies in 2012 and in 2010.

MBDance has performed across the world, from NYC SummerStage to Singapore to the My Body My Space Festival in Mpumalanga, South Africa.