Juliana F. May

Entry Point: Saturday March 21 4 PM - 5 PM | Purchase Tickets Here
Movement Workshop: Thursday March 26 10 AM - 12 PM | RSVP For Class Here

A Guggenheim and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Juliana F. May has intertwined practices of choreography and teaching. Since 2002, her work has been presented by Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Joyce SoHo, The American Realness Festival and Abrons Arts Center, among others. May has been awarded grants and residencies through The Map Fund, The Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Brooklyn Arts Council and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2002, May received her BA in Dance and Art History from Oberlin College, and, in 2012, she received an MFA in Choreography from the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. May serves as the Artistic Advisor for New York Live Arts' Fresh Tracks Residency Program and has been on faculty at Sarah Lawrence College since 2017. May's work "Folk Incest" was nominated for a 2019 New York Dance and Performance Award for outstanding production, and toured to ImpulsTanz in Vienna, Austria. In 2025, May received the Sam Miller Award for performance from LMCC and was the Caroline Hearst artist-in-residence at Princeton University. In November 2025, May premiered "Optimistic Voices" at BAM Next Wave Festival, where she was also named the Harkness Artist-in residence for BAM Fisher. In 2026, May will reprise Optimistic Voices at the Chocolate Factory Theater and MCA Chicago, among other national tours. 

On Saturday March 21 at 4 PM Choreographer Juliana F. May and dramaturg Hilary Clark for a conversation about their working relationship over the last ten years as they reflect on their last piece, Optimistic Voices, and begin to think and envision May's next work, "Dreams part III”.

Juliana F. May will host her Choreographic Idiom Class on Thursday March 26 at 10 AM. Developed over the past 10 years, Choreographic Idiom is an improvisation-based class where you can work on dancing, performing, and choreographic process all within the same framework. In class, we upend typical structural strongholds by moving away from a mode of doing and processing. Can we do an improvisation or a series of exercises that are not about development or the "culminating idea"? Exercises, dancing/performing, and conversation are permitted to co-exist without having to constantly make sense of each other. Can this shift away from the notion of "culminating ideas" lead us deeper into radicalizing our choreographic and performative habits? This is an opportunity to come work on your work in a supportive and experimental setting. This is essentially an open score improvisation class.

“During my time at BASE, I will be working with my longtime dramaturgical collaborator, Hilary Clark, on movement, text, and song development to kickstart the third and final part of my trilogy, titled Dreams part III”.