Cristina Planas Leitão

Cristina Planas Leitão holds a BA in Contemporary Dance from ArtEZ (BA), Arnhem (NL), 2006.

In July 2022, she takes over the Interim Artistic Direction of the Performing Arts Department of ÁGORA, Porto (Teatro Municipal do Porto, DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva) and in February 2023, will assume the co-Artistic Direction, together with Drew Klein.

As a performing arts programmer, she highlights her collaboration with DAP, under the Artistic Direction of Tiago Guedes, and where she is part of the programming team for the regular seasons of TMP (from 2019), Festival DDD since the 2020 edition and CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva developing his artistic project and mission since its opening in 2021. She was executive coordinator of the 2019 edition of the DDD Festival. In 2011, in Porto, she was one of the initiators of the desNORTE meetings (2011-2017) and was part of the initial artistic consultancy group of Braga’27. Her aggregating curatorial practice is focused on the development of sustainable creation formats, new narratives and care relationships within the performing arts.

She approaches her choreographic work as an act of resistance and affection, researching themes connected with social and political movements and their relationship with the performative body, in the intimacy of the theater. She created The very delicious piece and The Very Boring Piece, co-creations with Jasmina Krizaj, bear me, FM [featuring mortuum] and UM [unimal] – a piece highlighted by the newspapers Expresso and JN in 2018. Her work is documented in the series Portugal que Dança / RTP2 (Ep. 02). As a teacher, she teaches internationally with a somatic and unconventional approach. She is a mentor and regular teacher at ArtEZ HK, Arnhem (NL).