CURRENT POSITIONS AND ARTISTIC LEADERSHIP

She is currently Artistic Director of Materiais Diversos and its festival, leading a renewed phase of one of Portugal’s key decentralised cultural organisations. In 2025 she co-founded SUPERNOVÆ with Natalia Álvarez Simó, an international curatorial and consultancy platform working across artistic strategy, institutional development and cultural transformation. She is also founder and artistic director of Mula, an independent hybrid-disciplinary festival, developed as episodic formats and co-created with Luísa Saraiva, with its first edition in Porto. Since 2024, she also coordinates the Artistic Research module at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands.

CURATORIAL PRACTICE AND INSTITUTIONAL THINKING

Between 2018 and 2024, Planas Leitão was Programmer and later Artistic Director of Teatro Municipal do Porto, DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, and the residency centre CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva. In these roles, she strengthened the international reach of the institutions and developed an artistic vision grounded in collaboration, diversity, and long-term structural transformation.

Her curatorial practice interweaves curation, research, and artistic organisation, promoting sustainable practices and hybrid formats with strong political and social relevance. She understands curatorship as an act of hospitality, grounded in long-term relationships and a collective ethics of work. Alongside her artistic direction and programming practice, she regularly serves as a juror, dramaturg, mentor, and advisor in international contexts. She was a juror for the Portuguese Platform of Performing Arts (2023 and 2025), the La Caixa / O Espaço do Tempo Creation Grants (2023–2025), and numerous other institutions, awards, and open calls. She also served as a nominator for the SEDA – Salaviza European Dance Award by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Her work operates across institutions, festivals, and independent contexts, navigating different scales—from large public programmes to intimate research environments. She builds ecosystems grounded in care, long-term commitment, artistic development, and public responsibility. Working across disciplines and geographies, she privileges permeability over categorisation, creating conditions where artistic, social, and civic experiences intersect and generate new forms of encounter.

She is particularly interested in festivals and cultural platforms as spaces of conviviality: temporary communities where artistic, social, everyday, and ritual dimensions coexist. Beyond presentation formats, she develops structures that allow for gathering, hospitality, celebration, reflection, and collective presence, expanding the role of culture in public life. She is a significant figure in the redefinition of curatorial and institutional practices in Portugal, contributing to ongoing debates on equity, risk, and institutional transformation.

PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE

Since 2010, she has taught internationally across universities, festivals, studios, and companies. Her pedagogical practice runs in parallel with her curatorial and institutional work. While her focus has increasingly shifted toward artistic direction and curatorial leadership, she continues to collaborate in higher education and artistic training contexts, particularly within artistic research trajectories in academia. Her teaching and artistic thinking are informed by several years of somatic training, her study and practice of yoga, and her long-term engagement with the movement methodologies of David Zambrano, which she has also taught internationally. These experiences have contributed to a pedagogical approach grounded in embodied knowledge, attention, and presence. Her practice engages collective learning environments, artistic research, and expanded pedagogies, maintaining education as a central dimension of her curatorial and artistic work. She is particularly interested in forms of knowledge production that emerge through practice and relation.

CHOREOGRAPHIC PRACTICE

As a choreographer, she works with performance as an act of resistance and affection, exploring the relationship between social and political realities and the performing body. Her work moves across choreography, performance, and hybrid formats, often engaging intimacy, collective memory, power structures, and embodied knowledge. Notable works include [O SISTEMA], UM [unimal] (2018), co-produced by Culturgest, Teatro Municipal do Porto, and Teatro Aveirense, which investigates dances of resistance and the physicality of marching as a political and survival gesture, as well as FM [featuring mortuum] and The Very Delicious Piece XL, finalist of Danse Élargie (2016) and co-produced by Modul Dance / EDN. Her artistic work is also featured in Portugal que Dança series on RTP2 (Episode 02).

DRAMATURGY AND ARTISTIC COLLABORATIONS

As a dramaturg, she collaborated with Marco da Silva Ferreira on Fcking Future* (2025) and Sugar Rush for TanzMainz. As a performer, she worked for several years with Marco da Silva Ferreira and Catarina Miranda, among other artists—experiences that continue to inform her practice.