luciana achugar (b. 1970) is a latinx immigrant from Uruguay; grew up mostly in Venezuela in political exile and developed her voice as a choreographer between New York and Montevideo, Uruguay. She makes work from the rage of being a LatinAmerican living in the belly of the Empire in a post-colonial world. She makes work as a practice of growing a new body; an uncivilized body, a decolonized body, a utopian body. She makes work as a practice of building a new theater, another/other theater, OTRO TEATRO, a utopian theater. She makes work as a practice of growing as one would grow a plant. She makes work with a desire to escape the oppression of the arrow of time; to arrive at a place of beyond time, ritual time, body time…

Since 2013 she has been developing her Pleasure Practice, a deeply sensorial embodied practice to allow for other knowledges to emerge from the knowing in the body, an embodied rebellion by practicing being in pleasure; a practice that she teaches internationally and that continues to inform her creative process and her relationship to making work as resistance and as a possibility for healing and mysticism.

Her work has been shown in most contemporary dance venues in NYC and many venues across the US such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN and the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX; as well as in a few Festivals in Europe, in Mexico, Cuba and in Uruguay. She was a two time Bessie Award recipient plus once nominated; and has received numerous accolades such as the Alpert Award in Dance, the Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship.