Graduate Student Directory

Summary of Expertise

Through my research on the Santo Daime bailado, I am developing the interdisciplinary concept of corpo/realization, acknowledging self-movement as the source of all knowledge and bringing the field of postmodern dance studies to psychedelic science.

Research Interests

I am interested in postmodern dance studies, decolonial theories of dance, Brazilian popular culture, especially dance practices from the Northeast, and dance as knowledge sharing and corporeal political commentary.

Biography, Education and Training

I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latinx Studies department. My dissertation research is focused on the Santo Daime bailado, a dance central to this Amazonian ayahuasca religious practice. I am analyzing the bailado as a from of corporeal knowledge and ayahuasca pedagogy asking what does this dance choreograph and what are the experiences of daimistas who practice this dance form regularly. 

Honors, Awards and Grants

2022 UCSC, LALS Summer Publishing Fellowship; RCA Reading Cluster Grant                                                                        2021 Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant; UCSC Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Program; UCSC Latin American and Latino Studies Department QE Fellowship; UCSC, LALS, Conference Funding,  (retroactive): Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics

2020 UC Global Community Health and Wellness Fellowship

2019 Source Research Foundation Fellowship for Psychedelic Studies; UCSC Latin American and Latino Studies Department Summer Research Funding; Graduate Student Association Travel Grant                                                                   

2008 The 418 Project, Artist in Residence, My American Dream, dance/theater piece; Theater Bay Area, Dancer’s Group CA$H Award; Cultural Council of Santa Cruz, Project Grant

Selected Presentations

“Currents of re-membrance: The Santo Daime bailado and epistemologies of dance in psychedelic science”, Psychedemia, Ohio State University.

2022

“Currents of resistance: The Santo Daime bailado as subjectively Brazilian choreography”, XVI congress of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA).

2022

“O bailado do Santo Daime,” II International Symposium -  Associação Internacional de Estudos de Afetos e Religiões (AMAR) e Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (CCHLA/UFPB).

2020

“Santo Daime: An early 20th century Amazonian ‘rave’,” UCSC Chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.                                                               

2019

“Santo Daime, A Religion of the Forest,” guest lecturer: The Sociology of Drugs, Pharmaceuticals & Botanicals Sociology Department, UCSC, Professor James Doucet-Battle.

2018

Teaching Interests

My interdisciplinary course "Anticolonial dancing of the Americas" introduces students to critical perspectives on the role dance has played and continues to play in the formation of the Americas. As an activity that mobilizes cultural processes of social transformation, dance has historically strengthened, challenged and altered social structures. In this class, students will engage with a diverse range of perspectives on dance practices and analyses of ways dance has contributed to the constitution of identities and as well as resistance against colonial domination throughout histories of the Americas to the present day. Broadening notions of what dance is and what those who participate in dancing experience in different social, cultural and political contexts, this class is inspired by dancing bodies as bearers of socio-cultural knowledge. Centering a study on dance within this pedagogical approach to a hemispheric study of the American continents encourages different ways of considering the Americas as a sociological concept that is not bound by geography, but travels through the bodies of those who identify as American, whether Southern, Central or Northern. Moving between and among studies of different epistemological values danced throughout the Americas and beyond, this class provides tools for deeper appreciation of dance as a primary human activity, as generative of socio-political identities, as resistance against bio-political institutions, and as a category of methods for imagining desirable futures.