Maria Palazzi

Maria Palazzi is a designer, animator and creative director whose work has fundamentally changed how choreography can be studied and shared. Rather than working as a performer or choreographer herself, Palazzi has translated dance into digital forms, making invisible structures visible to new audiences and disciplines.

Palazzi studied design and art education at The Ohio State University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Design and a Master of Arts in Art Education. In 2001, she became director of Ohio State's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), a position she held through 2017. During her tenure, she built collaborations among artists, designers, computer scientists and scholars, focusing her own research on storytelling through computer-generated graphics, visual communication and information design.

Beginning in 2005, Palazzi, dance scholar Norah Zuniga Shaw and choreographer William Forsythe developed *Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced*. Published in 2009 with more than thirty contributors, the project took Forsythe's 2000 choreography as its source and created interactive visualizations of cues, alignments, movement material and organizing systems. Rather than replacing the dance with notation, *Synchronous Objects* offered multiple ways to inspect relationships difficult to perceive in real time—synchronized timelines, annotations and spatial graphics that directed attention toward structure and counterpoint.

The project became widely cited as a model "choreographic object" and extended beyond its screen-based form. A 2010 installation at PACT Zollverein brought the visualizations into a gallery setting, and Palazzi's 2012 explanatory video remains part of the archive. The work demonstrated that dance could generate interactive artifacts across disciplines without reducing performance to steps.

After stepping back from the ACCAD directorship in 2018, Palazzi returned to full-time teaching. She served as interim director again beginning in 2020 and continuing through a sabbatical before 2023. Currently a Professor of Design at Ohio State, she continues developing interdisciplinary digital resources and experiential-media education, extending the collaborative methods pioneered at ACCAD beyond any single dance project.