Joana Rita

As an interdisciplinary artist & researcher my work is centered on practices for inhabiting damaged ecologies and imagining multispecies livable futures. This operates on both micro and macro scales: from inhabiting wounds of individual bodies to collectively inhabiting ongoing histories of exploitation and displacement, paying attention to emergent patterns and weaving between them.
All my work emerges out of encounters with humans and nonhumans within situated ecologies. I shapeshift between theory and practice and different artistic mediums to activate magic, the sensing body and collective imagination and to make space for mourning and flourishing amidst the residues of disruption. I’m interested in queer cosmovisions, symbiosis and alchemical processes of mutability.

I am currently pursuing a PhD in Performing Arts and the Moving Image at the University of Lisbon, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology while living in Catalunya. My background includes living and working communally across many human-drawn borders, from high rural mountains to the urban seaside. I have completed the IB Diploma at the Mahindra United World College of India in Maharashtra, India (2011-2013); an undergraduate in theater and public action at Bennington College, Vermont, USA (2014-2018); and a masters in sensorial language and poetics of play/synchronicity and meaning making with Teatro de los Sentidos in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain (2018-2020). I have participated in trainings, conferences and workshops around environmental grassroots organizing, sustainability, expressive arts therapies, physical theater, clowning, somatic practices and medicinal plants.  I have experience in theater education for both children and adults and have created and performed in gardens, pine forests, meditation spaces, schools and streets. I have also been deeply involved in regenerative farming projects as well as in seed and food sovereignty initiatives. I enjoy going on walks and drinking herbal tea every single day.