nibia pastrana santiago
Based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and trained in improvisation, nibia pastrana santiago develops site-specific choreographic events to experiment with time, fiction, and notions of territory. Her work has been commissioned by EMPAC (2026), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2025), the Mead Art Museum (2024), MASS MoCA (2022), de Appel (2020), and the Whitney Biennial (2019), and has been supported by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. She was a 2020–2022 Fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University, and University of Texas, Austin. Along with dance scholar Susan Homar, nibia is co-editor of Inhabiting the Impossible: Dance and Experimentation in Puerto Rico (University of Michigan Press, 2023). The first-of-its-kind book brings together writing by artists and scholars to survey the field of Puerto Rican experimental dance across four decades. nibia holds an MFA in Dance with a Minor in Latina/o studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a postmaster in performance and scenography studies from a.pass, Belgium. She served for five years as the Academic Coordinator of the Dance Program at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, the first and only BA in Dance on the island. Her practices on laziness are deeply analyzed in the chapter “Doing Nothing Together,” included in Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (2022) by digital media scholar Tung-Hui Hu. Most recently, she collaborated as curatorial advisor for the major exhibition at the MCA, Chicago: Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón.
