Merli V. Guerra (MFA in Dance) is an award-winning choreographer and interdisciplinary artist combining dance, film, art, and design. She has a background in classical Odissi Indian dance, ballet, and modern/contemporary, while specializing in dance and technology, and screendance. Guerra is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Luminarium Dance Company, an award-winning 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization merging dance and illumination in Boston, MA (founded 2010), and Princeton, NJ (since 2017). She also founded and directs the PLACE Project (Presenting Landmarks through Artistic Community Engagement), a custom-tailored annual event that integrates history, dance, and the arts to celebrate a town’s cultural and historic landmarks (founded 2012). Guerra is the Assistant Professor of Dance Technology at Texas A&M University.

As a professional Odissi and modern dancer, Guerra has performed lead roles with acclaimed companies on tours to India (2007, 2012) and Japan (2009). In 2021, she traveled with a biologist across Tanzania creating site-specific screendances in response to its national park ecosystems. In 2022, Guerra was an artist in residence with Organização Buinho (Portugal) where she created a new screendance honoring the town's 16th-century monastery ruins and a public QR code film installation highlighting community members. Guerra’s films and choreographic works have been presented by 100+ events across the U.S. and internationally, with interactive art installations permanently on view in the U.S. and Portugal. She received a 2022 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from NJ State Council on the Arts and Mid Atlantic Arts for her work in film, and is a 2015 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s prestigious Gold Star Award for her work with site-specific dance and community engagement. Her 2021 work The Time Traveler’s Lens is a series of 360-degree virtual reality screendance films illuminating the history of the colonnade ruins at Princeton Battlefield State Park, and is now a permanent installation on the park grounds. She has presented on this project and her work with dance and XR film technologies at Our World Heritage International Globinar 2.0 (2021); Harvard University Virtual/Augmented Reality (2021); Northeast & Mid-Atlantic Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit (2022); and most recently, at the 2022 Women in Dance Leadership Conference, where she led a panel on “Dancemaking & the Digital Realm: Investigating creative intersections of dance and technology.”

Beyond choreography, Guerra is a freelance graphic designer and arts journalist who served as Art Director of Art New England magazine for five years, followed by her work at Princeton University Press. As a writer, she is Senior Contributor to Boston’s The Arts Fuse, and a dance critic for the Toronto-based Fjord Review and Vancouver-based Dance International magazine.