nibia pastrana santiago

Based in San Juan, Puerto Rico and trained in improvisation, nibia pastrana santiago develops site-specific choreographic events to experiment with time, fiction, and notions of territory. Her work has been commissioned by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2025), The Mead Art Museum (2024), MASS MoCA (2022), de Appel (2020), and the Whitney Biennial (2019), and has been supported by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. She was a 2020-2022 Fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University, and University of Texas, Austin. Along with dance scholar Susan Homar, nibia is co-editor of Inhabiting the Impossible: Dance and Experimentation in Puerto Rico (University of Michigan Press, 2023). The first-of-its-kind book brings together writing by artists and scholars to survey the field of Puerto Rican experimental dance across four decades. nibia holds a master of fine arts degree in dance with an emphasis in Latina/o studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a postmasters in performance and scenography studies from a.pass, Belgium. She has collaborated and performed in works by DD Dorvillier, Jennifer Monson/iLand, and Miguel Gutiérrez. Her practices on laziness and doing nothing are deeply analyzed in the chapter “Doing Nothing Together,” included in Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (2022) by poet and digital media scholar Tung-Hui Hu.