Mersiha Mesihovic

M.A. '18

Merisha Mesihovic

Mesihovic, founder & artistic director of CIRCUITDEBRIS - a space for interdisciplinarity, radical dance & community engagement is a Bosnian/Swedish NYC- based dance | performance artist and cultural organizer. Mesihovic initiated CIRCUITDEBRIS in 2011 to formally conceptualize her collaboration with artists across disciplines and passion for community engagement. Her work has been presented internationally and received support from New Dance Alliance and New York Foundation for the Arts. She was a resident artist at the Choreo Collision/Danza Venezia (2012), New Dance Alliance, NYC (2015), Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, (2015), Earth Dance in Massachusetts, (2016), BRIClab in Brooklyn (2016) and Denmark Arts Center, Portland, Maine (2017) and has had the honor of dancing in works by contemporary icons as Ohad Naharin, Colin Connor, Trisha Brown, Rami Beer, and collaborated closely with such intrepid artists as Karen Bernard, Reggie Wilson, Visnja Krzic, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and saxophonist/composer James Brandon Lewis. In 2015 she did dramaturgy for Kosoko’s critically praised #negrophobia. Mesihovic’s work is interested in human behavior and the infinite possibilities of the human body, challenging our perception of what is possible. Vocabulary of displacement and non-fixity of identity found in diasporic cultures, the trans-national position of her birth land Bosnia and Herzegovina and her experience as a refugee gives birth to her movement language and her ability to facilitate transgressive & transformative community spaces. Mesihovic is actively developing her unique movement practice/method M-BODYMENT interested in re-connecting us to our energetic body and discovery of the spiral dynamic present within the body. She teaches at a wide range of institutions and cultural organizations in US and abroad, including Gibney Dance Center and Peridance Capezio Ceneter in New York. She is a frequent guest lecturer at the Wits University in Johannesburg and the TUT University in Pretoria, South Africa.

Education

New York University

Master of Arts - Performance Studies

New York, New York

 

California Institute of the Arts

Bachelor of Fine Arts - Dance

Santa Clarita, California       

 

Iwanson International School for Contemporary Dance

Dance

Munich, Germany

 

Balettakademien

Dance

Stockholm, Sweden

 

Sarajevo National Ballet School

Dance

Bosnia and Herzegovina