Maria Bauman Morales

Maria Bauman is a “Bessie” award winning multidisciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL. She is also a sought-after facilitator and speaker on the topics of social justice practices within performing arts, embodied and arts-based leadership development, and racial equity in the arts. Bauman creates bold and honest artworks for her company, MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and intimacy. In particular, Bauman’s site-responsive dance work centers the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of Black queer people in multiple immersive ritual settings. She draws on her study of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs, as well as concert dance classes to embody interconnectedness, joy, and tenacity. Bauman-Morales brings the same tenets to organizing to undo racism in the arts and beyond with ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), the grassroots group she co-founded with Sarita Covington and Nathan Trice. 

Bauman is a 2021 Redtail Artist in Residence and BRIClab residency winner. Recently she was a 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence and the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. MBDance is currently touring Desire: A Sankofa Dream online, a performance experience in choice-making and Black Queer survival technologies. 

She's an active member of our community outside of choreography and performance. Bauman mentors younger artists through Queer Art Mentorship. She is a Core Trainer with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, collaborating towards racial equity. In 2014, she co-founded 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.” Bauman has facilitated community engagement workshops for numerous groups and has helped create cultural campaigns with various locals of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)