María José Contreras Lorenzini
Associate Professor, School of Theatre, Universidad Católica de Chile
María Jose Contreras Lorenzini is a Chilean performance artist and scholar. She holds a Ph.D from Università di Bologna and is Associate Professor at the Theater School at Universidad Católica de Chile. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Using a wide range of formats, from massive public interventions to intimate actions of resistance, Contreras creatively explores the relation between the body and memory. Her work presented throughout the Americas and Europe include theatre productions, site specific performances, durational performances and urban interventions. In the context of the commemoration of the state coup in Chile she convened “#quererNOver”, an urban intervention that involved 1200 people lying in the streets of Santiago to commemorate the more than 1200 detenidos desaparecidos. Some of her recent performances include: "Suelo", which took place in Plaza Italia in Santiago and affronted the relation between surveillance and human rights, and “Aquí” that consisted in the embodied marking of places where women were assassinated in the first months of the dictatorship.
She has published chapters in international volumes such as Múltiplos Olhares Sobre Processos Descoloniais nas Artes Cênicas (Brasil, 2018), Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (Palgrave, 2017), Frontières & dictatures. Images, regards (L’Harmattan, 2016). She has recently served as co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press 2019). She is one of 70 international artists featured in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader (Routledge 2020).
Working Group Affiliations
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project