MAYA OLIVA is an Italian choreographer and dancer with family roots in south of Italy, Poland, Venezuela, and Canada. She was born in Montréal, grew up in Firenze, and has lived in Milano, New York, Brussels, and is currently hopping between Firenze and Helsinki.
She has performed her work in Italy, Belgium, France, Finland, Iceland, Czech Republic and various cities in India.
Shaped by a three-generation-long nomadic background, Maya explores themes of belonging and the unearthing of home through the flesh, sound, and the choreography of contradictions. She works with layering and bringing different elements and mediums into relation through the lens of movement –a word she feels encompasses not only the body but also what surrounds and exceeds it. Through movement, or putting textures in motion, she creates and searches for friction: the kind that rubs and squeezes out paradoxes in the ways we narrate our histories and identities tied to cultures that can feel both plastic and visceral at once. Multilayered beings with multilayered bursting and dissonant emotions –felt dramatically, sensitively, intensely, rawly, or all at once.
These elements inhabit Maya’s aesthetic world, which moves along the fringes of recognizability and familiarity, while simultaneously questioning, deconstructing, and twisting those very aesthetics and expectations.
Maya completed three years of studies at P.A.R.T.S. Brussels in 2016 and graduated with an MA in Choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2022.
Her work has received support from Centro Nazionale di Produzione Virgilio Sieni (IT), MigraMenti (IT), Finnish Cultural Foundation (FI), Arts Promotion Centre Taike (FI), and Goethe Institut (BE).
Maya has also been selected for platforms dedicated to emerging choreographers, including NEU NOW - ELIA (Europe’s Emerging Artists), Danse Dense - Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (FR), and DNAppunti Coreografici (IT). In 2017, she won the first prize for choreography at the Jarmila Jeřábková Award in Czechia with the duet Blue Gloom, created and performed with Tina Afiyan Breiova.