I work as a dance artist, educator for young children, and childcare provider. I have an extensive background in western concert dance (modern/contemporary performance, choreography and dance education) and I have experience running a small non-profit in a rural area. I am passionate about an equitable, thriving, anti-racist Southern US region; ruralness; accessibility; lgbtq+ health and thriving; and dance education.
I identify as a white, southern, cisgender woman from the USA. I’m queer and I practice non-monogamy. I see myself at the end of the “early-career” artist stage, transitioning into the beginning of the “middle-career” artist stage. I highly value accuracy, slowness, patience, restraint, wildness, agency, individuality, and coalition. I attempt to continually broadly educate myself about accessibility, and about identities with which I do not identify. I enjoy meeting new people. I enjoy being alone. I’m an aspiring parent.
Dance Bio:
Mauri Terra Connors is an artist from Rockbridge County, VA. Currently she is located in Durham, NC, where she was a guest artist with ShaLeigh Dance Works on their 2022 project enVISION: Sensory Beyond Sight. She teaches dance at Barriskill Dance Theatre, Ninth Street Dance and elsewhere in Durham. Check out the Teaching > Available Classes tab for more information. She is working with collaborator Matthew Young on a dance concert to be produced in March of 2025 in Durham, NC.
From 2018 through 2021, Mauri was the Artistic Director of Halestone Dance Studio, located in Lexington, VA. In that role she provided artistic direction, strategic management, operational management, grant-writing, production, and education for a small, rural arts non-profit.
Accomplishments in that role include:
- Oversaw construction of organization’s first mission statement
- Authored organization’s first strategic plan
- Managed organization and dance studio under COVID-19, including pivoting to online, hybrid, and outdoor instruction to safely meet mission
- Applied as an organization for the first time to 6 grants, 5 of which were awarded
- Secured grant funding of over $15,000
- Oversaw solicitation of new donors and managed year-end fundraising campaigns that raised over $13,000
- Oversaw the establishment of organization’s endowment with the community foundation
- Conceived and piloted innovative transportation programs to increase access to area children
Mauri received her BA in Dance with honors from Connecticut College in 2015, where she studied with David Dorfman, Heidi Henderson, Shani Collins-Achille, Lisa Race, and Shawn Hove. She has performed with Jenny Davies/ Progeny Dance and was a performer in Vicky Virgin’s Arm Dance #1: Forgiveness, a dance for camera. Her writing and visual work have been included in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Performance Journal, and About Place Journal.
Mauri makes work with movement, paper, and words and her current artistic projects include a series of manuscripts of fiction stories set in the past and future of the Virginia countryside. These stories blur fantasy and reality, and discuss the importance of desire in the pursuit of living a moral life.
Mauri teaches enjoys teaching modern and contemporary dance to people of all ages, particularly young children. She is listed on the Virginia Commission for the Arts Teaching Artist Roster.
Mar I Terra 