luciana achugar (b. 1970) is a latinx immigrant from Uruguay who 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 Latin American living in the belly of the Empire in a postcolonial 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 founded in the practice of being in pleasure. She teaches this practice internationally, and it 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 New York City and elsewhere across the United States, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Fusebox Festival in Austin; it has also been featured at festivals in Europe, Mexico, Cuba, and Uruguay. achugar is a two-time Bessie Award recipient, has received project grants from Creative Capital and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, won a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for dance, and was a 2013 Guggenheim fellow.