she/her/ela/ella
Arts Division
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Latin American & Latino Studies
Theater Arts J Offices
J-10
by appointment via email
Theater Arts Center
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 MAP Fund, Doris Duke Foundation, National Performance Network, California Arts Council, and National Center for Choreography Akron, 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. In 2022 she was awarded the prestigious Creative Capital Award for her latest project "Body as a Crossroads" (BAAC), 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, she has performed long-term with CONTRA-TIEMPO and Viver Brasil dance companies and was 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 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.
