maura nguyễn donohue
MFA Director, Professor
Maura Nguyen Donohue, Director of MFA in Dance, Associate Professor of Dance, Faculty Associate for Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College/CUNY, Co-chair for Hunter's Public Scholarship Committee for the Presidential Task Force for Advancing Racial Equity, Chair of Arts & Humanities Division Curriculum Committee and a member of the Racial Justice Across the Curriculum Working Group of the Curricular Enhancements Racial Equity Committee, Chair of Arts & Humanities Curriculum Committee. Prior to joining Hunter College as a full-time professor in 2009, she taught at Queens College, Mt. Holyoke College, Smith College and Hampshire College. She currently serves on the Artist Advisory Council for The Field and is a member of the Host Committee for the New Yorkers for Culture and Arts 2021 Mayoral Forum. She served on the Boards for Movement Research, the Congress on Research in Dance and Dance Theater Workshop and as Co-Chair of both the Small Capacity and the Breaking Boundaries subcommittees of The New York Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies) Committee.
She is Writer-In-Residence for the upcoming Danspace Project 2021 Digital Platform, was a Care and Kinship Fellow there from 2019-2020, and is editing a 10-year anniversary catalogue of the seminal Danspace Platforms. Her work “Whitelashing: White Fragility in the Ivory Tower” was part of Gibney Dance’s inaugural volume of the journal Imagining, edited by Eva Yaa Asantewaa and she wrote the Education Track Thematic Essay and Workbook, as well as serving as a Keynote Panelist and Community Facilitator, for DanceNYC 2021 Symposium. She has published academically in the collection Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance and for the Women and Performance Journal. She has also written for Culturebot, American Theater Journal, Dance Magazine, the Dance Insider, MR’s Performance Journal and was guest editor for Critical Correspondence’s “University Project.” She curates and co-produces the Estrogenius Festival, and has also curated programs for La MaMa and Danspace Project. She holds both a BA in Anthropology and Dance (‘92) and an MFA in Dance (‘08) from Smith College. With La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company since 1997, she has toured the US, Europe, and Asia in productions by Italian directors Motus, Croatian director Ivica Buljian, Ping Chong, and Andrei Serbhan/Elizabeth Swados.
From 1995-2005 Maura Nguyen Donohue/inmixedcompany was commissioned and produced regularly in NYC and toured extensively across the US and to Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand. As an artistic advisor for Dance Theater Workshop’s Mekong Project, Donohue curated and facilitated international exchange and residency programs for Asian diaspora artists in the US and Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. She continues to create and perform works in her "Tides Project" series, using reclaimed plastics and oceanic detritus to examine the legacies of bodies ecological and diasporic. She thanks the ancestors and the two incredible offspring for keeping the path clearly lit.
