Awilda Rodriguez Lora

Awilda Rodríguez Lora is a performance choreographer and cultural entrepreneur. She challenges in her work the concepts of woman, sexuality, and self-determination. These concepts are explored through the use of movement, sound, and video as well as through literal instantiations of an “economy of living” that either potentiates or subtracts from her body’s “value” in the contemporary art market. Born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, and working in-between North and South America and the Caribbean, Rodríguez Lora's performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities. In this way, her work promotes progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial legacies, and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez Lora has been an invited guest artist at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD), New York University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Dance Center, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), among others. Her solo work has been recently featured at DEFORMES Performance Biennale (Chile), Posta Sur Performance Encounter (Chile), Independence Dom (Dominican Republic) and the Miami International Performance Art Festival (USA).

Rodríguez Lora is currently a host at La Rosario in Santurce, where she is creating, researching, and producing her life project, La Mujer Maravilla, while developing new strategies for the sustainability of live arts in Puerto Rico. After more than ten years of work as a fully independent artist, she is committed to further studying how artistic economies can be harnessed to support alternative forms of life rooted in communality, creativity, and social justice.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Latino/a Studies Program; Center for Ethnic Studies; Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department; Department of Dance; Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy; Department of African American and African Studies; and the Wexner Center for the Arts

Awilda Rodríguez-Lora is a performance choreographer. Her work challenges misconceptions about womanhood through the exploration of sexuality, empowerment, and self-determination. These concepts are explored through the use of movement, sound, and video as well as through a methodology she calls the “economy of living”—which can either potentiate or subtract from her body’s “value” in the contemporary art market.

Born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, and working in-between North and South America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Rodríguez-Lora's performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities. In this way, her work promotes progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial legacies, and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

The Puerto Rican Arts Initiative (PRAI) is an arts incubation platform intent in incentivizing contemporary art practices that engage community in post-hurricane María Puerto Rico. The project is housed at Northwestern University in partnership with the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art and La Espectacular Artist Residency. This project is supported by generous funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University, and contributing college and university campuses hosting PRAI artists across the United States.