Meghan K. Abadoo Receives Choreographers’ Showcase Audience Choice Award

Meghan Abadoo

Meghan K. Abadoo photo by Zachary Z. Handler

Congratulations to UMD School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies’ Meghan K. Abadoo, the recipient of the Audience Choice Award at the 33rd Annual Choreographers’ Showcase!

The winning piece was an excerpt from her work Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home. Inspired by characters of storytellers and racial justice activists Harriet Tubman Davis and Octavia Butler, the piece explores the essence of the black woman and was performed by Abadoo, Sydney Parker and Jasmine Watkins.

As the Audience Choice Award Winner, Meghan is eligible for participation in The Clarice’s NextLOOK series. NextLOOK is a partnership with Joe’s Movement Emporium that cultivates work in development by regionally based artists by providing time, space and dollars in the Joe’s Movement Emporium theatre venue for five days. The residency culminates in a public performance with an opportunity for audience feedback.

About Meghan K. Abadoo

Meghan K. Abadoo is a choreographer and teacher based in Mount Rainier, Maryland. Her performance credits include company member with Gesel Mason, David Dorfman Dance, Urban Bush Women and Liz Lerman. She has taught as a guest artist at Brown University, James Madison University, East Carolina University, Dickinson College and the University of Virginia. She is an adjunct artist with the Dance Exchange and MFA candidate in dance at the University of Maryland.

Her current work explores the intersections of race and gender embedded in the “dance event,” addressing the capacity for art, especially dance, to catalyze and sustain social action. In the spring of 2015 Abadoo co-directed and choreographed a site-based dance-theatre adaption of the 1988 film, School Daze, written, directed and produced by filmmaker, Spike Lee. She is also an intergroup dialogue facilitator with UMD’s Words of Engagement program and a student of the Mountain and River’s Order of Zen Buddhism. She loves to read, draw with loose ink and fountain pen and spin to Stevie Wonder with her daughter in the comfort of their kitchen.