BIO
Awilda Rodríguez Lora is a performance choreographer and cultural entrepreneur.
She challenges in her work the concepts of woman, sexuality, and self-determination.
These concepts are explored through the use of movement, sound, and video as well
as through literal instantiations of an “economy of living” that either potentiates or
subtracts from her body’s “value” in the contemporary art market. Born in Mexico, raised
in Puerto Rico, and working in-between North and South America and the Caribbean,
Rodríguez Lora's performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities. In
this way, her work promotes progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial
legacies, and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez
Lora has been an invited guest artist at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD),
New York University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Dance Center, and
the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), among others. Her solo work has been recently
featured at DEFORMES Performance Biennale (Chile), Posta Sur Performance
Encounter (Chile), Independence Dom (Dominican Republic) and the Miami
International Performance Art Festival (USA).
Rodríguez Lora is currently a host at La Rosario in Santurce, where she is creating,
researching, and producing her life project, La Mujer Maravilla, while developing new
strategies for the sustainability of live arts in Puerto Rico. After more than ten years of
work as a fully independent artist, she is committed to further studying how artistic
economies can be harnessed to support alternative forms of life rooted in communality,
creativity, and social justice.
Artist Statement
I embody experiences. I believe that spectatorship is an act of witnessing that produces
a shared space mediated by flesh, emotions, ancestry, and intangible life experiences
that can be destabilized (jamaqueadas) by confronting my brown, queer, usually
half-dressed or naked body with that of the witness-spectator’s (espectador testigo).
The co-presence of the witness-spectator’s body and my own allows for a level of
vulnerability, honesty, and intimacy that is similar to--yet at the same time completely
distinct from--the bonds of friendship, family, and sex that often link bodies to one
another, and which I believe can serve as a catalyst for social change. - Awilda
Rodríguez Lora