Michael J. Morris

Michael approaches choreography and performance as resources for generating personal and collective healing and liberation through affective experiences that activate sensations, perceptions, intelligence, and intuition in our bodies as well as innovating how we organize our social relations with the human and more-than-human world. Their work has been presented at universities, galleries, community spaces, theaters, bars and nightclubs, films, domestic spaces. Michael’s choreographic and performance work draws influences from early formalist postmodern dance, burlesque, Japanese Butoh, and ritual practices. Morris has studied Butoh in both the U.S. and at the Kazuo Ohno Studio in Yokohama, Japan. Morris was an active queer burlesque performer from 2012 until 2016. They were a principal dancer with Viva Valezz! and the Velvet Hearts! and were a featured performer in the 2015 Fierce International Queer Burlesque Festival. Michael has also served as dramaturge for FluxFlow Dance Project, Larry Arrington, Available Light Theatre, Maree ReMalia, the Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project, James Graham Dance Theatre, and Erik Abbott-Main | Boy Friday. They are a contributing artist to Livable Futures.

Michael was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University from 2015-2021, where they taught in the Department of Dance, Women's and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and Environmental Studies. They hold a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, where they were awarded both the Presidential Fellowship and the Graduate Associate Teaching Award, the highest recognitions for graduate research and teaching at Ohio State. Their dissertation "Material Entanglements With the Nonhuman World: Theorizing Ecosexualities in Performance" examines the ways in which performances of dance, performance art, and pornography provide modes of thinking the ecological entanglements between sexuality with the more-than-human world. They are certified to teach Labanotation through the Dance Notation Bureau in NYC. They also completed their 200-hour Lotus Flow Yoga Teacher Training at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center in San Francisco.

In 2019, they had the pleasure of co-facilitating workshops with Keith Hennessy at ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Austria, and Ponderosa in Stolzenhagen, Germany. They have also been visiting faculty at SNDO—the School for New Dance Development—at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, teaching the gender theory workshop. They have previously facilitated workshops and lectured at University of Michigan, Middlebury College, California State University Long Beach, The College at Brockport SUNY, Point Park University, Oberlin College, University of Wisconsin Madison, Virginia Commonwealth University, Otterbein University, Ohio Wesleyan University, and The Ohio State University. They have been an adjudicator for the American College Dance Association from 2018-2020, in the Mid-Atlantic South Region, the Northeast Region, and the Baja Region.