Bio

Dustin Maxwell is a movement-based visual artist currently living in New York City. He was born queer into a Mormon family of eight in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he took his first ballet class at the age of three. As a teenager he studied modern dance and Barbara Clark's somatic approach with his teacher, Joanne Emmons. In 2005 he relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota where he spent a decade studying dance and performing locally and internationally. He began studying butoh with Gadu Doushin in 2010. His work is sourced from ritual and sensitizing practices and aims to preserve those elements within "finished" works. Since 2017, he has been developing "dance artifacts" which are mostly drawings that depict the psychic remains of his dance experiences. Otherness, sexuality, spirituality, death and the magic of being are themes central to his art and life. His dances and performance installations have been presented in theaters, galleries, basements, alleyways and countrysides in Minnesota, New York, and Germany. He holds a B.A. in Dance from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and was nominated for a 2015 Sage Award for Outstanding Performer.