short bio

Marina Magalhães is a border-crosser, bridge-builder, and dance-maker from Brazil currently living on unceded Uypi land stewarded by the Amah Mutsun people (aka Santa Cruz, CA). Known for her provoking performances and radically inclusive workshops, Magalhães invites movers of all kinds to find the connection between movement-making in the body and movement-building in our communities. Her choreography has been called, “stirring... hypnotic,” by the Los Angeles Times and, “riveting... a physical and emotional feat,” by South Africa’s Creative Feel Magazine. Magalhães is a recipient of grant awards from Creative Capital, MAP Fund, Doris Duke Foundation, National Performance Network, National Center for Choreography Akron, and California Arts Council, and a recipient of the LA Weekly Theater Award for Best Choreography. She has shared her work in renowned theaters like REDCAT (LA), The Ford (LA), Bowery Ballroom (NYC), Centre Chorégraphique National (Montpellier), The Wits Theatre (Johannesburg), and nightclubs and living rooms around the world. Her newest project, Body as a Crossroads (BAAC), is a multi-faceted platform rooted in Magalhães’s border-crossing movement approach que no cree en frontreras; recent BAAC activations have been presented by CounterPulse (SF), DiverseWorks (Houston), Scripps College (Claremont, CA), and Casa de Cultura SoMovimento (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil).

As a professional dancer, Magalhães has performed long-term with CONTRA-TIEMPO and Viver Brasil dance companies, and has been a featured guest in works by Bessie Award-winning choreographers Bill T. Jones, Marjani Forté-Saunders, and Joya Powell. As a community-rooted teacher and cultural organizer, Magalhães is known for spearheading pedagogic initiatives that uplift racial and healing justice—most notably, the Dancing Diaspora platform she ran from 2017-2021 in partnership with Pieter Space. Magalhães was based on Tongva Land (aka Los Ángeles, CA) for seventeen years until 2023 when she relocated to northern California to join the UC Santa Cruz Department of Performance, Play & Design as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Dance. She identifies as an academic-interventionist (in the lineage of M. Jacqui Alexander) and is committed to centering Afro-Latin social dances and BIPOC contemporary dance within the university’s arts curriculum. Magalhães holds a B.A. degree in World Arts & Cultures/Dance from UCLA and an M.F.A. degree in Dance from University of the Arts.

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Dancer & Choreographer

Magalhães was born in Brasília, Brazil to Brazilian diplomat parents. She grew up nomadic, living between Brasília, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, La Paz, Madrid, and Chicago before rooting in Los Angeles to pursue her dance studies at UCLA’s Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance. In 2007 she began working with CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Company under the mentorship of Ana Maria Alvarez as an Apprentice and Administrative Assistant, training in Afro-Cuban dances and the company’s unique dance activist methodology. In 2010 she graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in World Arts & Cultures (Dance Concentration) and a Minor in Women’s Studies. That same year, she became a full-time Company Member, Teaching Artist, and Rehearsal Director with CONTRA-TIEMPO, going on to become Assistant Artistic Director and Director of Arts Education in 2013, and ending her journey with the organization in 2014 having completed her tenure as Artistic Director Interim. During her time with CONTRA-TIEMPO, Magalhães toured throughout the US and Cuba and co-founded one of the company’s most successful programs to date, the Futuro Summer Intensive, which she designed and directed for three years.

From 2014-2016 Magalhães returned to her nomadic roots—living in Bahia, Brazil to study with renowned Afro-Brazilian choreographers Vera Passos and Rosangela Silvestre; apprenticing with Urban Bush Women Dance Company in New York for the creative process of their acclaimed work, “Hair & Other Stories”; and joining Viver Brasil Dance Company as a performing artist for their 2015 season in Los Angeles. During that time she also premiered her first evening-length work, “(UN)BRIDALED”, a dance theater experience that brought to life the defiant stories of immigrant women; it was hailed as, “the type of show that keeps concert dance relevant in our lives,” by LA Dance Review. The work was co-produced by CounterPulse Theater in San Francisco in 2015, toured nationally alongside the acclaimed band Las Cafeteras, and was later adapted for Magalhães’s Artist Residency with University of Witwatersrand’s Drama for Life program in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In 2017, Viver Brasil commissioned Magalhães to create ”Cor Da Pele”, a concert dance work that interrogated anti-Black sentiment in Latine culture through the lens of Afro-Brazilian dance. The piece was set on the company and premiered at their sold-out 20th Anniversary Celebration at the 1,200-seat theater The Ford in Los Angeles. “Cor Da Pele” was selected for the Americans Dance Abroad 2018 Pitchbook and was a finalist for National Endowment for the Arts (NEFA)’s National Dance Project grant in 2018. In 2017, Magalhães began collaborating with renowned Colombian visual artist, Carolina Caycedo, with whom she choreographed the acclaimed dance film, “Apariciones", commissioned by The Huntington Library and shown in museums and festivals worldwide, including MCA Chicago, San Souci Festival (São Paulo), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and Instituto de Visión (Bogotá). “Apariciones” was called, “stirring… hypnotic” by the LA Times, and became the first video ever to enter The Huntington Library’s prestigious permanent collection. In 2019 Magalhães choreographed Caycedo’s film, "Thanks For Hosting Us, We Are Healing Our Broken Bodies" commissioned by the Orange County Museum of Art, adeptly described by the LA Times as, “uniting human body and water body into one.” Also in 2019, Magalhães traveled with Caycedo and collaborator Samad Raheem Guerra to Berlin where they activated Caycedo’s celebrated “Serpent River Book” at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum and DAAD Galerie.

From 2018-2019, Magalhães pursued her MFA in Dance at University of the Arts, a low-residency program designed for mid-career artists that primarily took place in Montpellier, France. During her time there, Magalhães was awarded the university’s Dance Fellowship and Life Experience Fellowship and presented her MFA Thesis performance, titled “Body as a Crossroads”, at the Centre Chorégraphique National in Montepellier. Dance Artist Bianca Medina played an integral role in Magalhães’s MFA, acting as a creative partner and performer in her thesis research/performance. In 2020, Magalhães was selected by USC Kaufman School of Dance as an artist-in-residence to present new work with USC Visions & Voices, which involved mentorship from acclaimed choreographer Bebe Miller. The process rendered her site-specific piece, circu(LAR)/circling(HOME), a duet between Magalhães & Medina framed as a study on Latine dance inheritance and (re)memory.

Magalhães was awarded the MAP Fund grant in 2020 and the prestigious Creative Capital grant in 2021 for the continued development of “Body as a Crossroads” (BAAC), now conceived as a multi-year performance project and ongoing methodology for radical embodiment. This led to a two-year partnership with Houston-based organization, DiverseWorks, which commissioned and presented “Womb”, an evening-length performance rooted in grief ritual and the first public activation of the BAAC project. The piece was conceived and directed by Magalhães, co-choreographed by Bianca Medina and Tatiana Zamir, and featured original artworks by Houston-based filmmaker Francis Almendárez and sculptor Anthony Suber. In 2023-2024, Magalhães held the first series of Body as a Crossroads Labs in partnership with CounterPulse and PiYoDa Flow, which invited community-rooted BIPOC artists from Los Angeles and the Bay Area to engage with the BAAC methodology. Also during this time, BAAC was awarded the prestigious Creative Administration Research grant by National Center for Choreography Akron (NCCAkron), which has entailed a 2-year mentorship with dance curator Marýa Wethers. In 2024, Magalhães led a 3-week BAAC residency at Casa de Cultura SoMovimento in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil with Core Artists Tatiana Zamir and Sammay Dizon, Administrative & Creative Partner Hannah Joo, and Visiting Artist Francesca Matthys. The residency culminated in “Corpo-Escuta” (“Body-Listening”), a public performance consisting entirely of improvisation by the dancers, live musicians, and lighting designer.

Teacher & organizer

As a community-rooted artist, Magalhães’s pedagogical projects hold a symbiotic relationship with her artistic work and are similarly committed to furthering feminist anti-racist healing justice visions for personal & collective well-being.

In 2017 she founded Dancing Diaspora in partnership with Pieter Space, a platform dedicated to sharing and reimagining dance practices of the Latin, Afro-Latin, and African diasporas in dialogue with local and global histories of cultural resistance. Magalhães taught the beloved Dancing Diaspora weekly community class from 2017-2021, directed the three-day Dancing Diaspora Festival in 2019 (which featured 30+ local artists of color and served 300+ community members), and in 2020 co-launched the Dancing Diaspora Collective with a group of twelve women and non-binary artists of color who curated virtual programming during the global pandemic for a worldwide audience of 1000+ people. In its 4-year run, 100% of Dancing Diaspora programming was funded by the California Arts Council and provided free to the public, with notable partners like Why We Rise LA, Metro Art LA, Vincent Price Art Museum, and Grand Park LA.

Past community/pedagogical projects include: the Decolonize the Body Through Dance Series, workshops that investigated socially engaged & spiritually rooted choreographic process which Magalhães held from 2015-2018 in partnership with Occidental College, Women’s Center for Creative Work, Main Museum LA, and the FUNCEB School in Bahia, Brazil; Center for Theater of the Oppressed International Exchange held annually from 2015-2019 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for which Magalhães was a Founding Organizer and Lead Portuguese-English Interpreter; the Undoing Racism Los Angeles (URLA) collective, which she co-founded in 2017 with other LA-based women artists of color and co-led until 2019, dedicated to organizing Undoing Racism workshops with People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond for their LA communities; and People’s Yoga, the first and only yoga studio in East Los Angeles, dedicated to providing accessible wellness practices for local community, for which Magalhães was a Lead Yoga Teacher from 2014-2020.

Magalhães has been teaching in academia since 2015, centering Afro-Latin social dances and BIPOC contemporary dance within university-level dance curriculum. She identifies as an academic-interventionist (in the lineage of M. Jacqui Alexander) and has held Adjunct Lecturer and Visting Lecturer positions in Dance Departments at UCLA World Arts & Cultures/Dance, UC Riverside, Cal Poly Pomona, and Scripps College. In 2023 she joined the UC Santa Cruz Department of Performance, Play & Design as a full-time tenure-track Assistant Professor of Dance, where she teaches today.

Since 2018 she has been a Lead Facilitator with Tatiana Zamir’s Heal Her Retreat held annually in Bali, Grenada, and Costa Rica; Magalhães teaches radically inclusive yoga and dance classes as an integral part of the program.