M A R Y A. C H A S E
Mary Chase and her company 
C H A S E D A N C E create and produce site-specific, multi-media collaborations, captivating audiences on stages in twenty-two US states and internationally in Europe, Asia, North and South America and now in the Middle East. Since 2000, over sixty-five works have been produced on stages around the world.
Every place Chase lives and works, she strives to create opportunity for cultural inclusion and dialogue as a global citizen and artist. Bridging art-making with contemplative practice is paramount to Chase’s artistic vision and ethos. Since 2023, she has co-led the Performance Co/Lab and Performance Co//ective first established at 421 Arts Campus in Abu Dhabi with Carlos Páez González. This past year she performed in the Abu Dhabi Art Bienniel for The Poem that Jumps the Fence created by Bik Van der Poll and was a performer and creative producer for the film MUJO, working with artists from Purring Tiger/ NYU Abu Dhabi. Also in 2024, she produced the Abu Dhabi premiere of The People’s Project, a community-based monument of collective healing at the Cultural Foundation that propelled the formation of Abu Dhabi’s first ever movement based artist collective, City of Movement.
Mary’s artistic passions extend widely in Abu Dhabi stemming from her belief in the importance of community-centered access to the arts. She is the director of Emirates School of Dance providing dance education to students throughout Abu Dhabi in eleven locations with a faculty of eight artist educators. Chase believes that leadership and artistic direction succeeds when braiding tradition with innovation. Since 2001, she has worked as an educator and an arts administrator across public, private and nonprofit institutions. She served as the Executive Director of Joy of Motion Dance Center of Washington, DC and directed the dance programs at the College of Southern Maryland, McCallum Fine Arts Academy in Austin, TX and Merrill International School in Denver, Colorado. She has held faculty positions at Eastern University, Coppin State University, Kansas State University, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin Peay State University, University of Tampa, and for the American Ballet Theatre Summer Intensive (Austin).
Chase is a Jingui Golden Shield Qi Gong student, a Certified Laban Movement Analyst and Practitioner from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, BFA from the University of Illinois and a Certificate of Non-Profit Leadership from the Center for Excellence in Non-Profits.
The C H A S E D A N C E Adapt/Synthesize/Create method was developed in 2009 and has since been taught around the globe as a process to collaborate across disciplines. This process, in part, is motivated by Chase’s experiences working with acclaimed theater, dance, and music artists like Tandy Beal, Claire Porter, David Justin, Karl Schaffer, Josephine Garibaldi, Tara Rynders, Helen Hansen French, Lauren Slone, Mary Lynn Lewark, Sally Jacques, Jenny Connell, and Margaret Nomura Clark.
