LACUSL talk: choreography and memory with Professor Maria Gillespie

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Flyer advertising Professor Maria Gillespie's LACUSL talk in March 2026Thursday, March 12, 2026
3:00pm – 4:00pm
American Geographical Society Library (AGSL)
UWM Libraries, 3rd floor east wing

This talk is part of the LACUSL Speaker Series: Join us to learn about the many topics you can study through UWM’s interdisciplinary LACUSL major (Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies). Save the date for our other Spring 2026 LACUSL talks!

Moving Between Tongues: Choreographing Translation and Embodied Memory

In this talk, UWM Dance Professor Maria Soledad Gillespie will share about her work as a choreographer, performer, dance and somatic educator. Gillespie explores dance as a liberation practice, and she draws on the fields of somatics, translation studies, narrative storytelling, and new media to chart a path for expressing body-based knowledges that exist before and beyond language. This work is shared with audiences through long-form choreographic performance installations, which connect Gillespie and her collaborators’ personal experiences to larger social and political meanings and rewrite narratives designed by colonial destruction. Professor Gillespie will share about how she got started in this field, the collaborations that enrich her work, and what sustains her artistic commitment through today.

Professor Maria Soledad Gillespie (she/they) is Professor of Dance at UWM, a CLMA Laban Bartenieff Movement Analyst, director of the MFA in Dance program, and director of two Milwaukee-based arts groups: MG/The Collaboratory and Hyperlocal MKE, both dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration and improvised performance. She has enjoyed choreographic commissions with numerous universities and cultural institutions (including UCLA, California Institute of the Arts, The Getty Center, La Cantera in Mexico City, and the Beijing Modern Dance Festival) and toured and taught internationally with her LA-based company Oni Dance. Gillespie’s choreography and performance have been recognized by multiple awards and grants, as has her teaching; she loves bringing improvisation methodologies, embodied anatomy, and choreographic thinking to students of all backgrounds.