Dance Guest Artists
Merián Soto
About
Dancer, choreographer, and video artist Merián Soto is the creator of aesthetic-somatic dance practices and methodologies, Branch Dancing and Modal Practice. Her more than 40-year career has spanned various artistic movements. Soto has collaborated extensively with visual artist Pepón Osorio on full-evening interdisciplinary works such as Historias (1992-1999) and Familias (1995). She is known for her experiments with Salsa, in works such as Así se baila un Son (1999) and La Máquina del Tiempo (2004). Since 2005 she has developed Branch Dancing, a meditative movement practice with branches that investigates consciousness in performance. The Branch Dance Series includes dozens of performances on stage, in galleries, video installations, and year-long seasonal projects. Soto is founding artistic director, along with Patti Bradshaw and Pepón Osorio, of Pepatián, the Bronx-based, multi-disciplinary Latino arts organization. Since 1999, Soto has taught dance at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she is curator of the Temple University Institute of Dance Scholarship’s Reflection/Response Choreographic Commission. Among many accolades, Soto is the recipient of a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for sustained achievement (2000), a Greater Philadelphia Dance and Physical Theater “Rocky” Award (2008), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2015), and a United States Artists Doris Duke Fellowship in Dance (2019). Her current projects include Fenomenal, Rompeforma 1989-1996, a documentary co-directed and produced with Viveca Vázquez; ongoing collaborations with Eiko Otake, Awilda Sterling, and Silvana Cardell; and Legacy Unboxed, an archival and exhibition project in collaboration with Liz Lerman, Jawolle Zollar, Joanna Haigood, and Eiko Otake.