MAYU NAKAYA is a dancer and choreographer from Japan based in New York City. Nakaya’s choreography has been presented at MADE BY WOMEN organized by Dual Rivet and Move to Change presented by MODArts, IKADA Dance Festival, White Wave SoloDuo Dance Festival, Green Space, and selected Emerging Artists Theatre's Spring 2023 New Work Series. Currently, as a dancer of Nakaya has a member of Helen Simoneau Danse, sarAika Movement Collective, and the improvisation-based company Open Dance Ensemble additional has worked with Yoshito Sakuraba, Catherine Messina, Faustine Lavie, Yuki Ishiguro, and worked with Jesse Obremski and Jie-Hung Connie Shiau at Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance in 2022. She participated in several dance competitions in Japan and the Seoul International Dance Competition in 2016-2019, dancing her choreographies; she had many top prizes and first-place awards. Nakaya started ballet training when she was three years old. After then, she learned contemporary dance and choreography, gaining a lot of performing experience at the Contemporary Dance Course at Tokyo Metropolitan High School of Arts and the The University of Tsukuba.She moved to New York City in 2019 studied at The Ailey School scholarship program for two years. As an immigrant, she has met many difficult barriers such as differences in culture, values, and language. However, through dance she has experienced firsthand that there are moments when such barriers fall away and people's hearts resonate. Nakaya’s goal is to use her body to express her work in New York City, where people from all walks of life gather, and to convey the wonder of how dance can resonate with people's hearts and the power that comes from within the body.