Catarina Saraiva

I present myself as performing arts curator and researcher, but I could say that I’m a manager, producer, dramaturgist... Resuming, I’m a cultural worker who needs to know a lot in many fields in order to develop the projects I conceive and work with.

For several years, I’ve worked in big projects as alkantara, in Lisbon and Panorama, in Rio de Janeiro. After 10 years in alkantara, in 2009 I went to Madrid, took a master degree in Performing Studies and started to work/research on models of non-hierarchical relation between programmers and artists in the arts market. I also started to collaborate with institutions and collectives that proposed models to rethink citizenship collaborations: in arts, in environmental issues, in gender equality.

In 2011, I moved to Rio de Janeiro, to co-program Panorama Festival. This meant to reshape my values, my centers and working methods. In 2014, I left and decided to work on smaller scale projects, where I could experiment art as a critical tool for the production of knowledge; networking and partnerships as new models of ethical work.

Between 2015 and 2018 I worked with Movimiento Sur, a platform based in Chile where we reshaped the format, allowing artists from Latin America to meet and exchange practices, based on the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zone.

In 2017, I’ve returned to Portugal. The cultural life in Lisbon was very alive. But outside the big cities, the artistic and audience development was not the same. I’ve decided to develop a project in my home-town, Coimbra, a very conservative university town. The project is called Linha de Fuga: an international creation laboratory and festival that took place for the first time last year. While designing this project, I was invited to rethink and curate Verão Azul Festival, an experimental arts festival in a region that concentrates life in tourism, main source of resources.