Cristina Fernandes Rosa
Meet Cristina Fernandes Rosa
Moving across:
embodied practices, dance studies, ecologies of knowledges and decolonial turn.
Dr. Cristina Fernandes Rosa is an artist-scholar making work at the intersection of dance, bodily arts and visual culture. Rosa is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton’s department of Dance and a member of its Centre for Research in Arts and Creative Exchange. Meanwhile, she is currently serving as a Visiting Professor at the School of Dance of the Federal University of Bahia, in Salvador (Brazil, 2021/22). Dr. Rosa previously taught at various universities in the USA, namely UC Riverside, FSU Tallahassee, Tufts University, Reed College, CalArts, CSU, Chico, and UCLA . Additionally, Dr. Rosa was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Universidade de Brasilia (Brazil, 2011) and a Post-doctoral Fellow at Freie Universität’s IRC Interweaving Performance Cultures in Berlin (Germany, 2012-13).
Rosa's creative practice is informed by distinct Afro-Brazilian movement practices, including capoeira angola, dança afro, samba-de-roda, and frevo, as well as contemporary dance forms, yoga, and meditation. In the area of visual arts, she has worked across installation, drawing, painting, photography, and graphic arts.
Rosa's formal education includes a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA, chaired by dance studies professor Susan L. Foster, and a Master in Art from UW-Madison, chaired by performance studies professor Laurie Beth Clark, and a post-graduate specialisation in Ethnic and Racial Studies and African Culture from the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador (UFBA, Brazil). This international program was lead by distinguished professors such as Angela Davis and Mara Viveros Vigoya.
CosmoAngola workshop at Kilombo Tenondé
Rehearsals for [Re] Birth (Brazil 2022)
Dr. Rosa’s creative work has circulated internationally and her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and monographs. She is currently involved into two interrelated research-creation projects. The first, titled Movements of Sustainability, interweaves a wider range of creative bodily practices with the concept of sustainability, understood here as a series of ecological relations, namely the care of self (individual ecology); the care of others (social ecology); the care of environments (territorial ecology); and the care of ideas (ecology of knowledges and ways of knowing). The second, titled CosmoAngola: Confluence of Bakongo Cosmology and Capoeira Angola, is a collaboration with capoeira master-teacher Cobra Mansa, who recently completed his doctoral degree in education and African ancestry, and the maroon community and activist mestre Nego Bispo.
Lecture performance "The Whiteness of Dance Studies" 2019
