Dr. Almiro Andrade

An actor, director, playwright, dramaturg and theatre translator with a PhD in Translation of Brazilian Contemporary Drama through devising for performance at King’s College London. His approach sees all stages of theatre-making as an act of translation and his practice champions the production of international pieces in the UK since 2008. His current works include: the first English translation of Namibia, Não! by Aldri Anunciação; a gender-bending adaptation of The Blind One and The Mad One by Cláudia Barral produced by Foreign Affairs Theatre; and recently published three new translations of the Brazilian canonic playwright within Nelson Rodrigues – Selected Plays, by Oberon Books.

Layla Benitez-James

An editor and translator based in Alicante whose poems are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, and the Latino Book Review. Poems and translations have appeared in Poetry London, The London Magazine, Hinchas de Poesia, The Acentos Review, Guernica, Waxwing, Revista Kokoro, La Galla Ciencia, and elsewhere. Audio essays about translation can be found at Asymptote Journal Podcast and print essays have been published in Tenderly Mag and Europe Now Journal. God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode but He Had to Make Sure was selected by Major Jackson for the 2017 Cave Canem Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and published by Jai-Alai Books in Miami.

Xinha Morais

An Angolan, Portuguese born and East London bred writer performer. She writes both for theatre and for screen, her writing is highly inspired by Angolan history and mythology as well as personal experience of being a black woman. Her first play Firecracker was an exploration of the relationship between Angola and Brazil through capoeira. Her most recent work is a mockumentary comedy web series about 4c hair on YouTube.

Eddy Janeth Mosquera Hinestroza

A theatre educator and playwright. From 2012 to 2016 she taught in the Dramatic Arts BA course at the Universidad del Valle, Buenaventura. She has been writing plays since 2011, when she penned a piece on abortion, Por mi Puta Madre, followed in 2013 by La Gata, a story about a woman and the Catholic Church which was written for the Long Distance Affair collaboration organized by PopUP Theatrics in New York. In 2015 she wrote Iceberg, a text about gender violence, and in 2016 Esquizoide which explores the end of conventional relationships for couples. More recently, she has written Trastornos (2017), another play on abortion, and Las mujeres de Sara, which addresses the racialization of sexuality and racism. An extensive analysis of the latter was featured in the 2019 book Autores afrocolombianos. Dramaturgia para la liberación y la escena, written by the Cali dramaturg Rodrigo Vélez. In 2020 she founded Gimnasio para Escritores, an online e-learning course aimed at writers of fiction.

Johanna Robledo

A theatre actor, director and educator (MA in Scenic Creation and Direction; BA in Dramatic Arts, Universidad del Valle). She is a member of the research group Laboratorio Escénico Univalle through which she has participated in important national and international festivals such as FITB (Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá), ATEC 7th International Forum with the 2nd Asian Theatre Schools Festival (Beijing, China), and Festival De Teatro Clásico De Almagro Y Festival Fringe (Madrid, Spain). She belongs to the artistic laboratory Sietesorongos, which won an award with Pinocho está en el Congo, a play that reflects on the importance of collective memory and children’s participation in the armed conflict. Since 2016 she teaches in the BA Dramatic Arts course at the Universidad del Valle, where she has directed various productions such as Dostoevsky’s The Crocodile. She is director and founder of the artistic laboratory Turín Teatro, which staged Mina: un Woyzeck con acento de Buenaventura, a work which formed part of her MA thesis and which received a laureate distinction. In 2020 she staged Queloide by Juan Camilo Mutis, a project which won the first departmental call for the development of new cultural public by the Gobernación del Valle del Cauca; this was a collaboration between Turín Teatro and the theatre collective Cuaderno de Notas. Queloide was also selected for the ENCUENTRO VIRTUAL DE MUJERES AFRO EN ESCENA (Perú 2020). Finally, she serves as a role model in the workshops El Derecho al Derecho led by Masterpeace Cali.

Ramiro Silveira

A Brazilian director, researcher, lecturer and actor trainer. He is known for his innovative theatre process (subject of his PhD thesis) called Theatre Playground, a study of presence and relation based on rhythm, movement, and multicultural references to inspire creative connections. Since 2001 he has been using his technique to direct theatre and run acting and directing workshops in many different countries. Working professionally as theatre director since 1995, Ramiro has directed more than 30 plays in Brazil and abroad and has received several awards, including the Volkswagen Theatre Award and the Brazilian International Press Award UK for his achievements as an international theatre director. In 2018 he was the organiser and project curator of the book Nelson Rodrigues Selected Plays, published by Oberon Books. Since 2015 Ramiro is the head of the BA World Performance course at East15 – University at Essex in UK.

Manuel Francisco Viveros

A theatre actor, director, educator, and researcher. He starred in several plays on the Colombian stage, including Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and Shakespeare’s Othello. He was the general monitor of ‘Young Creators from the Coast’ project from 2004 to 2009, in which he premiered Con Carne y sin Pescado, an adaptation of Derek Walcott’s Beef, No Chicken for the XIV Colombian Pacific Book Fair, and later Roald Dahl’s The Twits. He directed Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People via a grant for Mixed Fund for the promotion of Culture and Tourism, Governor’s Office of Valle del Cauca, COLOMBIA 2008. He directed the Interschool Theater Festivals in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 in Buenaventura, Colombia. From 2011 to 2016 he was the head of the Dramatic Arts BA course at the Universidad del Valle, Pacific branch in Buenaventura. He is a Fellow of Manos Visibles, and holds an MA in Government and an MFA in Theatre Performance. He has 4 times been a guest of the National Theater conference of the Theater Communications Group (USA). From 2017-2019 he was a Fellow of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Spanish at New York University.

Eunice S Ferreira

Eunice S. Ferreira, Associate Professor of Theater, Skidmore College (New York), is a scholar artist whose research focuses on the intersections of theatrical performance and issues of language, race, class, gender, culture and national identity with a special focus on Cabo Verde, West Africa. She has produced, directed, and choreographed a variety of play and musicals, including the multilingual premiere of The Orphan Sea by Caridad Svich. She has published in U.S. based and international journals and is the Vice-President for the Black Theatre Association. Her first book, Crioulo Performance: Remapping Creole and Mixed Race Theatre, will be published by Vanderbilt Press. Her co-translation of Alone Onstage by Mário Lúcio Sousa is the first English-language publication of a play from the Cape Verde Islands. She is the daughter of Cape Verdean immigrants and is forever grateful to all those who came before her.