Maho Ogawa

Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NYC. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, “Minimum Movement Catalog” (https://minimum-movement-demo.web.app/movements). Maho Ogawa uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.

Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture and cinema. She’s working on public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about “silence,” providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. The aim is to empower the erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as an archive and audience-participating event, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways.

Maho’s works have been shown in Asia and in the U.S.A., including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Emily Harvey Foundation, to name a few. Ogawa received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and creation support at LMCC, Culture Push, Emily Harvey Foundation, LEIMAY, and New Dance Alliance. She is a 2023 Associated Artist at the Culture Push.