Biography

Marcos Duran, MFA, (he, him) was born and raised in San Jose, California. After directing the Brooklyn based Marcos Duran Performance Group from 2009–2017, he has been a So Cal dance theater artist creating Moving Works performance media and live shows that examine the intersectional spectrum of movement beings.

Currently embarking on a long distance collaboration with Bay Area artists Jenni Hong and Elise Knudson, he is co–producing (y)ours/arriving, an evening length physical theater performance premiering at ODC Theater in San Francisco in December 2025.

Concurrently, honoring his research at the Marina Abramović Institute in 2024, Marcos is also producing In the Name of Duration, an interdisciplinary performance gallery series. San Diego creatives, including stop-motion animation artist Derek Weiler, PHD, will respond to, “How do we endure?” The collective will create hybrid, digital + live performance experiences at City Heights Performance Annex in San Diego, California in April and May 2025.

But let’s rewind.

Since 2017, Marcos has been nurturing his roles as a dance educator, mentor, director, collaborator and performer within many academic institutions and non-profit organizations that serve the Southern Border region of the United States.

Marcos is a Dance Lecturer at UC San Diego, and was selected to join the UC San Diego Health: Sanford Compassionate Communication Academy Fellowship cohort of Fall 2024. He continues to serve as one of the few artist affiliate faculty in a unit of researchers creating new humanities curriculum for medical professionals.

He is a round one Far South/Border North Grant recipient sponsored by the California Arts Council with the Conrad Prebys Foundation. His evening length dance production, Dancing With Dignity, premiered at the City Heights Performance Annex in May 2024. Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Alliance San Diego’s Start With Dignity campaign, a priority included sharing this creative process with dance students at Chula Vista High School, uplifting the notion of dignity to help prepare them for navigating professional dance opportunities in the future.

In 2022, Marcos toured his evening length solo, Shapeshifter, commissioned by Strand Theater for a debut at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. His signature solo Exit to Wonderland was invited to Visionary Dance Theater’s Zen Festival in San Diego, as well as in San Diego Dance Theater’s WOW Festival show.

In 2021, Marcos was commissioned by Malashock Dance to make a new work, Neck, Knife, for their first Everyday Dances production at the Mingei International Museum. His art writing was published in HereIn, a journal for artists and writers, in addition to being featured in SD Voyager Magazine.

Marcos is also a dance filmmaker. His recently produced and directed dance films, Best to Move and Guardians of Water, are pending entry into international film festivals. In 2021 his short film, Minced, won the Best Performances award at the LA Experimental Film Festival after premiering in Disco Riot’s A Year of DisDance.

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Marcos was in the final days of completing his MFA in Dance Theatre at UC San Diego. He took refuge in creating Acts of Togetherness-19, a social media series that cultivated international, digital performance collaborations.

As a San Diego Fellowship graduate researcher at UC San Diego, he made three works between 2017-2020 that culminated 15 years of choreography. Heel, Skull (60 min), The Rules of the Game (25 min), and his thesis work, The Underground (95 min), all premiered at La Jolla Playhouse theater district. They exhibited accounts of social choreography, craniosacral audience integration, and interdisciplinary collaborations between visual arts, music, technology, and theater.

Now, let’s really go back…

Marcos (“Markie” to his loved ones) was born in 1984 in San Jose, California where he was raised by two large and vibrant Mexican American matriarchal families. Indigenous to the Mexico/US border region along the Sonoran Desert, he grew up hearing his elders say “we did not cross the border, the border crossed us.”

A child of the 80’s and 90’s, Marcos developed his theatrical and experimental sensibility with his passion for fiction novels and independent films. When he was 15, he organically began solo dance improvisation, a private and diaristic act of self nurturing and exploration.

When he was 18, Marcos began summer training in José Limón modern dance technique at San Jose State University. Much of his subsequent BFA dance training at UC Santa Barbara deepened his understanding of the Limón technique, in addition to release, contact / improvisation, choreography (concert, environmental, digital), and production.

A New Yorker from 2008-2017, he directed and performed in Marcos Duran Performance Group. As an artist-in-residence at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, his mission was to create and perform works that researched the diversity of humanity within himself and collaborating dancers. He was invited to share his work at Movement Research at The Judson Church, Dixon Place, La MaMa Experimental Theater, Theater for the New City, 92nd St Y, Center for Performance Research, Triskelion Arts, and Green Space among many other site specific spaces. From 2005-2008, he created and shared work in Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Francisco.

As a performer from 2000-2024, Marcos learned from working with Daniel Charon, Liam Clancy, Nancy Colahan, Kellye Dodd, Faye Driscoll, Erica Essner, Eric Geiger, Meredith Glisson, Valerie Houston, Jenni Hong, Jean Isaacs, Risa Jaroslow, Keith Johnson, Misa Kelly, Eun Hee Lee, John Malashock, Bronwen MacArthur, Dance Monks, Stephanie Nugent, Jody Oberfelder, Christy O'Harris, Jerry Pearson, Christopher Pilafian, Tonia Shimin, Yolande Snaith, Khamla Somphanh, Sasha Spielvogel, Terry Wilson, Bill Young, and the master works of José Limón as directed by Alice Condodina and Gary Masters. He has performed at national venues such as Jacobs Pillow MA, The Kitchen NYC, Diavolo LA, and Counter Pulse SF. He has toured internationally to South Korea, China, Mexico, Wales, and Ireland.