Founder and artistic director of Jasad Dance Projects, Meryem Alaoui is a Toronto-based dancer and choreographer from Morocco. A graduate of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre (2009), she has performed in works by Amanda Acorn, Peggy Baker, Antony Hamilton, Karen Kaeja, and Julia Male, among others, and has had her work presented in festivals and venues across Canada, in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and in Morocco.

In 2018, she founded the company Jasad, to support her vision of seeing more contemporary dance works created by and with artists, especially women, from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region in Canada.

Her current interests lie at the intersection of somatic research using movement and voice, and the exploration of contemporaneity through the reclamation of embodied performance practices, dances and knowledge from her culture as a Moroccan diasporic dance artist.

Meryem has received residency support nationally and internationally, namely at Hub14 and Dancemakers Centre for Creation (Toronto), Young Lungs Dance Exchange (Winnipeg), and Le HIBA_Lab (Rabat, Morocco), as well as project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils.

She is a certified Body-Mind Centering® Somatic Movement Educator, and she has facilitated multiple dance and movement workshops for dancers in professional settings as well as community and arts-education contexts, such as with Toronto Dance Theatre, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Arts Etobicoke’s art programs for seniors, Haneen Women Choir and The Arab Community Centre of Toronto.