Manuel “Manny” Macias

Manuel “Manny” Macias is an interdisciplinary artist and movement scholar whose work oscillates with the rhythms of migration, memory, and the body’s resistance to borders. Hailing from the areas east of the 605 in Southern California, Macias uses performance and embodiment to move alongside and against the imposed narratives of nation-states while cultivating the fertile soil of community to honor the legacies of transnational migrancy.

As a founding member of Mechanism Dancetheatre Collective, Macias grounds his work in decolonial collective performance practices in the often-overlooked landscapes of the Inland Empire. He is also a co-conspirator in FEK-MAC, a bicoastal performance experiment with collaborator Gayle Fekete, where the duo crafts visceral performances that interrogate power, displacement, and human connection.

Macias currently works with Movimiento (MVMTo), a Los Angeles-based collective dance project with Allie Miks and Julietta Magaña Pérez that explores and reconfigures gesture, memory, and action as a bodily playlist. The project moves through ephemeral archives of movement and collective histories to reimagine the relationship between body, place, and cultural memory.

Further cultivating the fertile soil, Macias is an educator who teaches contemporary movement, dancemaking, dance history, ethnography, and theory at Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Long Beach, and Chapman University. He encourages students to see dance as both an embodied archive and a site of resistance. He holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from Cal Poly Pomona and an MFA in Dance from Cal State Long Beach. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside.

For Macias, movement is more than choreography—it’s a practice of survival, transformation, and radical imagination.