Marlon Barrios Solano

Marlon Barrios Solano is a Venezuelan contemporary dancer, improviser and dance-technology researcher who connected embodied movement with networked media and creative coding. He developed as a dancer through apprenticeships with DanzaLuz and DanzaHoy, and in 1986 co-founded Danza Contemporánea de Maracaibo with Yasmin Villavicencio. From 1994 to 2001, he worked as a dancer and improviser in New York, collaborating with choreographers including Lynn Shapiro, Merián Soto, Dean Moss, Bill Young and Susan Marshall, while studying improvisation with Nancy Stark Smith, Jennifer Monson, Bebe Miller, K.J. Holmes and David Zambrano.

Barrios Solano completed an MFA in Dance and Technology at The Ohio State University in 2004, followed by software-engineering training that deepened his capacity to treat interfaces, cognition and audience participation as choreographic materials. In 2007–08 he launched dance-tech.net, an early social network for international dance-and-technology practitioners that grew into an archive of hundreds of interviews, performances and conversations. The platform became a model for how online infrastructure could sustain and document dance culture across geographic distances.

He extended that work through residencies and research collaborations: with Compagnie Gilles Jobin in Geneva from 2009 to 2012, the movimiento.org project in Spanish and Portuguese in 2011, ICK Amsterdam in 2013–14, HZT Berlin from 2013 to 2016, and a Hombroich Fellowship in 2017. These roles wove together documentation, knowledge transmission, performance and experimental interfaces into a single practice. His recent work moves into generative AI and embodied cognition, including a 2023 Radiona residency and the lecture-performance *Born in Latent Space*, which frames artificial intelligence as a participatory, choreographic environment where computation and bodily attention alter one another.