Melanie Maar is a New York based choreographer and dancer originally from Vienna, Austria. She works, teaches and lives in her loft space in Brooklyn. Maar co-curated the Movement Research Festival 2010 - HARDCORPS and was a MR artist in residence in 2007. Prior to the production of Spaces and Bones in 2010 her quartet Phenomenal Bodies was presented by Dance Theater Workshop NY in 2009. In 2008 the duett DOPA was seen at Danspace Projects Draftworks series. Over the last few yers she has developed a live dance-music-performance practice with Kenta Nagai and recently performed with the NY based improvisors group Action Theory. Her studies in cognitive science developed through her solo Off and On, which toured several Movement Disorder Congresses between 2005 and 2007. Since 2007 Maar has created different performance scenarios of endurance and transformation in designated spaces and galleries in NYC. In Sysiphus she birthed a stone egg on a roof. Her work has been invited to San Francisco, Vienna, Lisbon, Oslo, Aarhus and Berlin. Maar has worked extensively with New York choreographer Luciana Achugar, as well as with RoseAnne Spradlin, Levi Gonzalez, Luis Lara Malvacias, Daria Fain and others. Her dancing and teaching are rooted in her experiences growing up in her mother’s dance studio, Tanzstudio Maar, with Ballet and Flamenco. As a young dancer she trained at Move On and T-Junction studios in Vienna and performed in works by Silvia Both, Bob Curtis and Blair Darby. She moved to New York at eighteen, studied at the Trisha Brown school, The Hung Gar Kung Fu Academy, at Movement Research and engaged in various methods of body work and practiced Qi Gong with Daria Fain. She is a student of Janet Panetta. Maar developed and teaches a Qi Gong based movement class, as well as Energy Anatomy in Performance workshops for dancers.