Profile
Maria Koliopoulou is a female artist, activist, choreographer, performer and dance teacher with immigrant roots living and working in Athens. She earned a scholarship to the Laban Centre fοr Movement and Dance and studied Fine Arts at Vacalo School of Arts in Athens. She is a founding member and artistic director of Prosxima Dance Company.
She is an awarded artist of the Dance Research NRW, a scholarship of the NRW KULTURsekretariat. She has been awarded the Jarmila Jeřábková award (2008) at the New Europe Festival in Prague and the 2nd Prize at the International Contemporary Dance Festival of Algiers (2013) in Algiers.
In recent years she has presented works commissioned by the: Onassis Stegi, Athens Festival, Ephorate of Greek Antiquities, International Contemporary Dance Festival of Algiers, Stopgap Dance Company and Editta Brown Company.
As an independent choreographer she has collaborated with the Danish Institute – Bridges between Women Artists, the Neos Kosmos Theatre in W. Shakespeare’s Othello, the National Theatre of Greece in M. Gorky’s Lower depths, L. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and N. Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek. Her research for the work Made has been supported by Skånes Dansteater, Dansecentrum Syd and Konstnärsnämnden in Sweden.
With a strong collaborative background, she has been choreographing dance performances for diverse communities, involving people who love dancing, amateurs and professional dancers. She has been teaching workshops in dance technique, choreography and improvisation in higher education, in universities, in amateur and professional dance schools or institutions, among others the Belgrade Dance Institute, Kalamata International Dance Festival and the School of Fine Arts in Athens.
Maria has systematically researched and created several choreographic works, worked alongside performers of different abilities, as well as toured nationally and internationally. Her choreographic works have been presented on large- or small-scale auditoriums, on festivals, private institutions, theatres and various urban open spaces among others the: State Museum’s of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki - Off Borders Festival, Danceable#3, Holland Dance Festival, Philippi Festival, Tanz_House Festival - Salzburg, KosmosTheater - Vienna, Balkan Dance Platform - Ljublana, Cycladic Art Museum – Athens, Duo Dance International Festival, Budapest, Fringe Festival – Stockholm.
She has been a part of the Unlimited Access program, the iDance: Dance without discriminations project and currently the Europe Beyond Access program for which she has co-curated the final artist laboratory.
She has published the essay, “The development of the Artistic Skills in Dance Teaching”, in Culture and Art- seven essays on dance(Propobos Publications, Athens 2000, Greece). She has been a member of syndesmos chorou and common platforms, two initiatives that foster a dialogue between choreographers in Greece or exchanging ideas with artists from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Greece, Argentina, Spain, Great Britain. She practices in the martial art of Aikido since 2011 and holds the rank of 3rd degree black belt.
