Biography
- MA, dance education, Columbia University
- BA, dance, New York University
Award winning choreographer Merián Soto has been creating and presenting solo, group, and collaborative pieces in her native Puerto Rico, across the US and internationally since the mid-seventies. She has collaborated extensively with MacArthur award-winning visual artist Pepón Osorio on full-evening works such as Historias (1992) and Familias (1995), hailed as models for works created with communities.
As Artistic Director of the Bronx-based Latino arts organization, Pepatián, she developed and curated national and international projects featuring Latino new dance and performance artists including ¡Muévete! and Rompeforma: Maratón de Baile, Performance & Visuales, the international Latino artists’ festival in Puerto Rico from 1989-1996.
Soto is known for her experiments with Salsa - the dance and music of Pan-Latino collective experiences - in critically acclaimed works such as Así se baila un Son (1999) Prequel(a): Deconstruction of a Passion for Salsa (2002) and La Máquina del Tiempo (2004).
Since 2005 has created an extensive series of dances with branches including the award-winning One Year Wissahickon Park Project (2007-08), What is Love? (2007) (commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts), Postcards from the Woods (2009), Branch Dances at Wave Hill (2011-12) and SoMoS (2012).
Soto is the recipient of six Choreographers Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship by New York Foundation for the Arts and numerous project grants from institutions such as Dance Advance, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Lila Wallace Arts Partners Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, and NALAC Fund for the Arts. Her writings on dance have been published in Heresies Magazine and Movement Research Journal.
In 2000, Soto received a New York Dance and Performance Award "BESSIE" for sustained choreographic achievement, and in 2008, a Greater Philadelphia Dance and Physical Theater Award “ROCKY” for her One-Year Wissahickon Park Project. She is a PennPAT roster artist.