MAYA OLIVA (they/she) is an Italian choreographer and dancer from Firenze, with family roots in Southern Italy, Poland, Venezuela, and Canada. They were born in Montréal, grew up in Firenze, and has lived in Milano, New York, and Brussels. Shaped by a three-generation-long nomadic background, Maya explores themes of belonging and the unearthing of home through the flesh, sound, and a composing of contradictions. They work with layering and bringing different elements and mediums into relation through the lens of movement.
Through movement, or by putting textures in motion, they create 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, dissonant emotions –felt dramatically, sensitively, intensely, rawly, or all at once. These elements inhabit Maya’s aesthetic world, which moves along the fringes of recognisability and familiarity, while simultaneously questioning, deconstructing, and twisting those very aesthetics and expectations. Maya is currently interested in researching slow motion as a pre-verbal space of potential, exploring the stretching of time to invite focus on the fullness of details, as a choreographic interest as well as a way to question what is being perceived and why that is in relation to historiography and neuroaesthetics.
Maya holds a BA in Dance from P.A.R.T.S. (2016) and an MA in Choreography from The University of The Arts Helsinki (2022). They have performed their work in Italy, Belgium, France, Finland, Iceland, and Czech Republic. 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, they won the first prize for choreography at the Jarmila Jeřábková Award in Czech Republic with the duet Blue Gloom, created and performed with Tina Afiyan Breiova. In 2025, Maya has been awarded the international IMPULSTANZ DanceWEB scholarship.