Maira Duarte

BAX Teaching Artist & Dance Performance Workshop Director

Maira Duarte (she/her) is a Mexican New York artist, educator, and organizer. She directs Dance to the People, a collective that creates dance works and organizes donation-based classes and workshops, environmental dance research, community forums, and performance parties to address social and environmental injustice. In 2019, DTTP focused most of its work on public and participatory practices called Trash Outings, where participants picked up trash and then performed with it. Since then, members of the collective have used trash to produce elaborate costumes, props, and use them in choreographed performances in multiple public spaces. Other DTTP work includes The Tampon Piece, a cabaret-like feminist dance piece on how to use tampons, and Papalotl Muyus, a protest dance film in solidarity with migrant families at the US-Mexico border, made in collaboration with Semillas Collective and Mayday Space. Maira is faculty at Brooklyn Arts Exchange since 2014 and has taught for over 10 years in innumerable public schools in NYC and New Jersey, through BAX, The New Victory Theater and Dance Theater of Harlem. She was also a dance professor at the University of The Americas Puebla, Mexico in 2013. She is a contributor to the online publication Dancer Citizen and holds an M.A. in Dance Education from New York University.