Keone Madrid

Keone Madrid is a choreographer, dancer, director, and filmmaker who brought narrative dance storytelling from online platforms into full-length theatre. Growing up in San Diego, he began formal hip-hop training at approximately fifteen and developed his practice through the Southern California crew and studio ecosystem, including work with Future Shock, Culture Shock, and Choreo Cookies. In 2008, he met Mariel "Mari" Madrid at an Urban Legends workshop; they married in 2012 and built a sustained creative partnership centered on detailed, character-driven movement.

Keone and Mari's short-form dance films distinguished themselves through small illustrative gestures, tightly synchronized rhythmic detail, and stories told entirely through movement. Their work reached audiences well beyond the studio circuit, and they taught internationally while creating choreography for commercial, television, and music contexts. They expanded their practice into longer formats with projects including *RUTH*, a digital dance book integrating choreography, illustration, text, and screen interaction.

Their most substantial work to date is *Beyond Babel*, co-created with Josh and Lyndsay Aviner of Hideaway Circus. This full-length dance-theatre piece adapted a Romeo-and-Juliet framework to explore division, walls, and community. The work began with a San Diego production in 2018 and moved to an Off-Broadway run at the Gym at Judson in 2020, receiving two Drama Desk Award nominations. Keone's subsequent work has increasingly emphasized writing, directing, and filmmaking while sustaining the movement-based storytelling developed throughout his partnership with Mari.