Dance faculty

Dance Faculty > MERIAN SOTO

 

MERIAN SOTO
Associate Professor and MFA Program Coordinator,
phone: 215 204 6281
e-mail: msoto@temple.edu
Website: http://www.meriansoto.com

 

 

Award winning choreographer Merián Soto has been creating and presenting solo, group, and collaborative pieces in her native Puerto Rico, across the US and internationally since the mid-seventies. She has collaborated extensively with MacArthur award-winning visual artist Pepón Osorio on critically acclaimed works such as Historias (1992) and Familias (1995). As Artistic Director of the Bronx-based Latino arts organization, Pepatián, she has developed and curated national and international projects featuring Latino new dance and performance artists including ¡Muévete! and Rompeforma: Maratón de Baile, Performance & Visuales, the international Latino artists’ festival in Puerto Rico; and the first Bronx Dance Fest at the Hostos Center for Arts & Culture in New York City in 1999. Ms. Soto is the recipient of six Choreographers Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship by New York Foundation for the Arts and numerous project grants from institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, The Lila Wallace Arts Partners Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Harkness Foundation for Dance. Her writings on dance have been published in Heresies Magazine and Movement Research Journal. In September 2000 Ms. Soto received a New York Dance and Performance Award "BESSIE" for sustained choreographic achievement. The latest artistic works of Merián Soto center on the use of salsa - the dance and music of Pan-Latino collective experiences - as choreographic source. Her recent works include Así se baila un Son (How to Dance a Son Montuno) commissioned by Central Park SummerStage in 1999, and Prequel(a): Deconstruction of a Passion for Salsa, commissioned by the Joyce Theater in 2002. Presently, she is working on La Máquina del Tiempo (The Time Machine), an evening length work that explores the historicity of the body and popular forms in dance and music improvisation. La Maquina del Tiempo will premiere at Temple University in March 2004 followed by national touring.