Maria Nilsson Waller is a dance artist, choreographer, teacher and designer. She trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet school, ECSD Rosella Hightower, Cannes and Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. She has been working freelance across Europe since 2004 and has been based in Dublin since 2009. In 2018 she founded multidisciplinary production house Flora Fauna Project together with Irish composer and video artist Stace Gill/The Sei.
Maria has received commissions from Galway Dance Days (Founder, 2014), Dublin City Council (Journey, 2014) and Estrad Norr (Blanca, 2015). In October 2015 she premiered See the Man, a piece for 35 professional football players plus staff of ÖFK (Östrsunds Fotbolls Klubb, Allsvenskan, Sweden) – a unique collaboration between sports and dance. Other recent community collaborations have been The Forest, a piece for 80 schoolchildren in Ballyfermot, and The River, a piece for 17 women from Dublin Northeast Inner City.
Maria regularly collaborates with artists from other disciplines such as musicians, photographers, theatre and filmmakers and also composes music and design for her own work. She teaches regular professional class at Dance Ireland, Estrad Norr and the College of Dance, Dublin. Apart from this she has also completed, with drummer Magnus Vikberg, over 200 workshops in contemporary dance for primary schools in the north of Sweden between 2012 and 2015 through Skapande Skola.
She was elected Hoffnungsträgerin 2015 by Tanzmagazin and was a Dance Ireland Associate Artist 2013/2014. She received the prestigious HATCH residency by Dance Ireland 2017, as well as Riksteaterns Production Residency, 2018 for Flora Fauna Project. She is Dance Artist in Residency at D-Light Studios, Dublin and a former board member of Dance Ireland.