luciana achugar
luciana achugar is a dance maker and teacher whose work blurs the lines between theater and healing; and between dancing and ritual. She makes dances as a way of growing an uncivilized, decolonized, utopian body with a practice of being in pleasure.
Biography
achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, and was nominated for Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love (2016). She has received many accolades such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, MAP Funds, Jerome Foundation, 2017 Alpert Award and NYFA Artist Grants amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance”. The Pleasure Project, an ongoing space intervention project, has been seen since 2014 in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, the American Realness Festival in NYC and at the Seattle Art Fair. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her prior work “Brujx” premiered in October 2018 at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts during the Karl Marx Festival and toured to Hamburg for the HALLO: Festspiele in May 2019. Her most recent and ongoing current work "PURO TEATRO: A Spell for Utopia" began as an online project on instagram commissioned by and for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts' Time-Based Art Festival in the Fall of 2020, and was premiered as a live performance at The Chocolate Factory Theater co commissioned by NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in November 2021. She is currently a 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellow. achugar is currently pursuing her MFA at Bennington.