Bactéria

Cristina Planas Leitão works across artistic direction, festival programming and curatorial strategy in the performing arts. Her practice is centred on building artist-focused ecosystems, repositioning institutions and developing contemporary public platforms where artistic, social and political questions can be meaningfully engaged.

She previously led Teatro Municipal do Porto, DDD – Festival Dias da Dança and CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva, one of Southern Europe’s most dynamic municipal performance institutions and ecosystems, strengthening its international profile while deepening its commitment to artists, long-term processes and expanded relations between performance, audiences and the city.

Currently, she is Artistic Director of Materiais Diversos, one of Portugal’s most significant independent decentralised cultural organisations, recognised for its situated practices and strong international outlook. There, she is leading a renewed phase of artistic development, reinforcing the organisation’s role as a space for programming experimentation, transmission and sustained support of artistic trajectories.

She is also the co-founder and artistic director of MULΛ, an independent hybrid-disciplinary festival in Porto that connects multiple independent venues and reimagines the festival as a convivial and artistic experience unfolding from sunset until dawn.

Cristina is co-founder of SUPERNOVÆ, an international curatorial and consulting platform created with Natalia Álvarez Simó. Through this framework, she works as artistic and strategic consultant for institutions and companies, including Cullberg (Sweden), among others.

Her work moves between festivals, theatres, residency centres and independent initiatives, often engaging hybrid and interdisciplinary formats that cross choreography, theatre, sound, discourse and civic imagination. She is particularly interested in contexts that value risk, hospitality, plurality and long-term commitment.

For Cristina, artistic direction is not authorship but facilitation: the practice of creating the conditions in which artists, ideas and communities can meet, transform and resonate.