Maria Noujaim lives and works between Itamonte-MG and other cities.born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1986. Maria Noujaim is an artist, whose work encompasses dance, notation, sculpture, video and education. The inner core of her practice is dance as a vital expression of existence itself: all living things are interconnected and dancing. Her research explores originary themes such as myths, nature forms and patterns, ecological consciousness, and epistemology. Since 2012, she has been developing a performance work, building sculptural and symbolic choreographies amidst drawings, notations and installations. The moving body relates with the created objects and drawings, and together they construct the space. The choreographies also engender linguistic research, including different hand gestures and sign languages. She has presented her work in numerous national and international exhibitions and received the Grants and Commissions Program Award by Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (Miami-US), in 2020. In 2021 – during the pandemic – guided by an inner urge of making a radical life change, she left São Paulo to live in the Mantiqueira mountains of Minas Gerais. There, she began giving classical dance classes to local children and co-founded Campo Escola de Movimento, a non profit organization that promotes dance as a tool for education. In 2022, Noujaim presented the exhibition Lake at Schwabinggrad in Munich, curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, with the support of Salta Art Foundation. Lake is a choreography that dives into the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan and explores metamorphoses between human and animal, masculine and feminine, mortal and divine, kindness and strength. On that occasion, she also offered a dance and movement workshop entitled Metamorphic animals, alongside the show.