Born in Lisbon (1988), Maria studied at Escola de Dança do Conservatório Nacional (Lisbon), at P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), and at Stockholm University of the Arts, where she completed her master’s degree in New Performative Practices.
Between 2010 and 2012, she co-created the duet Light as a Feather, Green as an Apple with the dancer and choreographer Veli Lehtovaara.
As a performer, she has worked with Willi Dorner in _Bodies in Urban Spaces (2011/2012); Daniel Linehan/Hiatus in Gaze is a Gap is a Ghost (2012); Georgia Vardarou in_Phenomena (substituição) (2014); Radouan Mriziga in 3600 (2016); Anneleen Keppens in The Moon is the Moon is the Moon (2017); Marco Torrice in Melting Pot (2018); Trajal Harrell in O Medea (2019), The Köln Concert (2020), Friend of a Friend (2021) and Monkey off my back or the cat’s meow (2021); Renan Martins de Oliveira in Viaduto (2020); and Benjamin Vandewalle in Studio Cité (2019). She has also participated in the short film The Suspension of Disbelief (2013) by the visual artists duo Sarah & Charles and in the workshops/creations Cri et Baise (2015) by the stage director and choreographer Yves-Noël Genod and Title in process (2015) by the choreographer Xavier Leroy.
In 2013, she started a solid collaboration with the French choreographer Maud Le Pladec, dancing in her pieces Democracy (2013), Concrete (2015), PRESSION (2016) and Twenty-Seven Perspecives (2018), and working as an assistant choreographer in the project Borderline (2017), directed by the same French choreographer and Guy Cassiers. She has also worked with Trajal Harrell as a rehearse at Schauspielhaus Zürich between 2020 and 2023.
Maria is a visiting professor at Artesis Hogeschool in Antwerp and more recently at Stockholm University of the Arts. At present, she is working on a solo creation, Wild Explosion of Radical Softness, which will preview in October 2024 at Charleroi Danse in Brussels.
