MAURIAH DONEGAN KRAKER is a midwesterner, a collaborative performance maker, a walker, improviser, teacher. She is an advocate for slow travel: walking around the block and through the city as a means of attending to choreographic unfolding of time cycles in the body + land. 

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Mauriah’s background in athletics (competing as an Olympic-level athlete, touring with Pilobolus Dance Company, and being raised in a family that walked and biked everywhere) is a driver in the creation of physical works that live somewhere in the realms of dancing and walking. She has led folks on site walks through the Italian Alps, sound walks in southern France, and outings to highway underpasses and prairies in the Midwest- the walks culminating in participatory scores and dance performance. 

 

Mauriah holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving the Vannie L. Shiery Memorial Dance Scholarship for Outstanding Performance, the Wanda M Nettl Prize for Student Choreography, while serving as the Director of the Children’s Dance Community Program (2016- 2019). She has toured and taught at universities and cultural centers throughout the US and Europe, teaching movement workshops that draw on sounding, walking, improvisatory, and outdoor practices.

 

For the past decade, Mauriah has worked with Wild Space Dance Company as a dancer and an Artistic Associate. In 2018, she danced alongside Jennifer Monson, premiering the critically acclaimed duet bend the even at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. She currently writes and makes dances about place and endurance with her long-distance collaborator, Leah Wilks. Find her teaching in the Theatre Arts department at Lawrence University and walking the Milwaukee River/Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee lands where she is serving as an Artist in Residence of the Milwaukee River Greenway.