Dance Artist, Choreographer, Vocalist
Photography by Maria Baranova
Marie Lloyd Paspe (she/her) is a Filipina-American choreographer, dance artist, vocalist, and educator re-rooting the brown Asian body in the liberatory practice of kapwa. Her practice re-imagines forgotten memories that are sown into the genetic manuscripts of the body’s fascial maps. She is of Batangueña and Ilonggo lineage of Philippine islands Luzon and Panay. Marie was born in Singapore, grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada and Boston, MA, and has lived in NYC in every borough since 2012. She is of Batangueña lineage from her mom’s side from Mataasnakahoy, Batangas, Philippines and of Ilonggo lineage from her dad’s home in Iloilo City, Iloilo, Panay.
Marie’s multi-faceted and dynamic choreographies, vocal scores, and performance-making merges the ancestral with the future, creating work that engages with the sociopolitical and ecologically impacted identities of the diasporic brown, queer, home-yearning body. She has been awarded the prestigious Harlem Stage WaterWorks Emerging Artist Fellowship (2024), Target Margin Theater Institute Fellowship (2023-24), GALLIM Moving Artist Residency (2023), Asian American Arts Alliance Jadin Wong Fellowship (2022), and TOPAZ Arts Artist Residencies (2022, 2025). She is a grant recipient of Creatives Rebuild New York Guaranteed Income for Artists (2022-24), Brooklyn Arts Council, Queens Council of the Arts, and Late Stage Stipend from Mertz Gilmore Foundation. She was a former performer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2018-2024, having received a Bessie for Outstanding Choreography for contributions to Deep Blue Sea (2021).
Her performance and collaborative work spans dance, vocal, and interdisciplinary forms. She has performed with Ching-I Chang, Sugar Vendil, Kyoko Takenaka, Faye Driscoll, Carolyn Dorfman, Tingying Ma, Martin Harriague, Eva Kolarova, Peter Chu, Peter Cheng, and other brilliant artists. She frequently bridges her embodied choreographic practice in live performance with interdisciplinary musicians treya lam, Kyoko Takenaka, Sirintip, and Dan Gorelick. Her performance work in film has been featured in Taikang Space in Beijing, China, MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, UGNAYAN Festival based in Manila, Philippines, and Joe’s Pub in NYC, and in music videos by OHYUNG, AERI, and treya lam.
Marie’s choreographic works have been presented at Harlem Stage, MASS MoCA, Lincoln Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, Joe’s Pub, Green Space, Chelsea Factory, Ailey CitiGroup Theater, Arts on Site, Target Margin Theater, TOPAZ Arts, Queensboro Dance Festival, Bethany Arts Community, Smush Gallery, and Reeds Arboretum. Internationally, her work has been presented at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and UGNAYAN virtual Philippines festival. In June 2025 she will be conducting immersive research in Siquijor, Philippines and presenting her solo work sunod at Fete de la Musique PH Siquijor.
But as Marie and her collaborators let their bodies sing, we were there: together, in our imagined memory.
—Luna Beller-Tadiar, THE AMP
artist statement
My practice as a choreographer, performance maker, performer, and educator is rooted in radical empathy and sustainable revolutionary futures. As an immigrant who lived in four countries before age 6, I yearned for belonging. My work grounds the displaced, colonized brown Filipina body in her journey of finding home in response to forces that remove the body from her homelands, or spirit from her body. My work erupts the body as a site of liberation through re-turning to our waters, our spirit, and each other. It is in dialogue with my ancestors’ rituals that had no differentiation between Spirit/Life/Eroticism, Dance/Song/Ceremony, and One/Other.
I investigate the fascial maps of how ancestry lives within the body and how Spirit integrates amongst the physical world through interdisciplinary and expansive performance. I practice deep listening to site, objects, relationships, the nonverbal and invisible, to uncover choreography, sound, story, and installation. I am inspired by inherently interdisciplinary pre-colonial Filipinx themes such as kapwa (“I and the Other are One”), animist spirituality, and babaylans who heal through their connection with a diwata (“spirit”). Profound influences include fascial pilates work with elders in managing chronic pain; traditions of my Batangenyan and Ilonggo families; and performing in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-2024).
My work seeks to be a platform for diasporic folx to see their selves and stories reflected and bridged across differences. My commitment to conflict resolution and buoyant one-to-one relationships, thus healthy community bonds, are testaments to how I re-imagine and act towards a just and sovereign horizon. Through making the invisible seen, I seek to be a channel for my ancestors whose sacrifice fuels me to physicalize their accumulated visions into existence.