Profile
Maiya Murphy’s work focuses on physically based performer training programs and their relationship to theory. Maiya fuses her practical background in acting and dance with scholarly research and writing to re-envision the relationships between practice, theory, and the body. Maiya is passionate about articulating how physically based practices can contribute to larger conversations about the value of embodied practices and knowledge. Her dissertation includes how new conversations in cognitive neuroscience may help to re-imagine how the moving body participates in fashioning creative cognition in performer training programs. Maiya is an active member of professional associations in theatre including Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and (ASTR) Association for Theatre Movement Educators, and a 2011 recipient of a UC San Diego Humanities Division Initiatives Award. She has performed as an actor, dancer, and deviser from California to New York with companies such as mugwumpin and Motion Underground’s Elements of Motion. As Administrative Director in the graduate theatre program at Naropa University, she supported the program Chairs in ushering in two somatically based MFA programs in theatre. Born in Denver, Colorado to a Chicana mother and Irish-American father, Maiya follows in her parents’ footsteps by advocating for Chicana/o students in education, and actively supporting the youth membership of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a Buddhist organization committed to peace, culture, and education, of which she has been a lifelong member. She received her BA in Theater Studies from Yale University and was a member of the inaugural class of the Lecoq-based performer training program, the London International School of the Performing Arts (LISPA).
