I provide services to families and individuals from an ethos of agency and collaboration and the perspective that movement is life. Everything I do is grounded in the idea that movement is appropriate (and needed!) in any/every moment. From birth, growth, childhood, education, pregnancy, labor, and postpartum, I view clients as movers with rich knowledge of their personal experience. Grounded in principles of Body Mind Centering(™) and trained as a professional dancer, a BADT Full Spectrum Doula, and a BMC Infant Developmental Movement Educator (IDME), I provide birth support, IDME sessions, postpartum support, childcare, and dance experiences, all organized around YOU, your lived experiences and desires, and my knowledge of the human body and movement.
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.
‘Mar i Terra’ is a play on my nickname “Mauri” and my middle name “Terra”, which together mean ‘Mother Earth,’ as Mauri is an Irish form of Mary, which connotes ‘mother’. Additionally, mar is the word for sea in both Spanish and Catalan, two languages that are important to me, and i is the word for and in Catalan (and phonetically the same in Spanish), while terra means earth. Our connection to sea and land is incredibly important to me, and I bring this groundedness and ethos into my caretaking and art.
Dance Bio:
Mauri Terra Connors is an artist from Rockbridge County, VA. Since 2022 she has been located in Durham, NC, where she was a guest artist with ShaLeigh Dance Works on their 2022 project enVISION: Sensory Beyond Sight, directed by ShaLeigh Comerford and Davian Robinson. She has since performed in Brooks Emanuel’s liminal animal series at SleepyFest (2024, 2025) and at Bay 7 (2026); with Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre as a community chorus member in Devotion (2022); at Basement Art Space’s tank/TINK at perfect lovers (2024); and with Silvia Sheffield at the inaugural Recital, produced by Alyssa Noble and Chris Strauss (2023).
With collaborator Matthew Young, Mauri has performed at Shadowbox Sessions (2022, 2023), Sanctuary Series (2024), and with the band Soda Water Sea (2024). In 2025 they self-produced The Living Room When, a dance album, at Walltown Children’s Theatre.
Mauri teaches dance at Barriskill Dance Theatre, Ninth Street Dance and elsewhere in Durham. She was listed on the Virginia Commission for the Arts Teaching Artist Roster from 2019-2023.
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.