Cecilia Carvalhal Braga de Andrade

Interdisciplinary artist-scholar exploring performance, body, and identity
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United States (residence), Brazil (citizenship) °1984
research interests: Performance art, Queer studies, Wearable sculpture, Expanded cinema, Participatory art, Latin American art, Collective memory, Identity and embodiment, Gender studies
affiliation: University of Maine, Interdisciplinary PhD Program (iPhD)
orcid: 0009-0000-2631-7266
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Cecilia Carvalhal is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work investigates how power is inscribed on bodies through force, discipline, and destruction, and how these bodies, in turn, can expose and resist these mechanisms of oppression, becoming a medium for creative activism, collective experience, and agency in identity-making processes. Informed by performance art, intersectional feminism, and decolonial studies, she explores the body as a tool for storytelling by working with ritual, garment, and community-based participation, creating spaces where identity can be questioned and reimagined.


 

research

research expositions

  • It’s Natural (and Other Frictions) (2025) author(s): Cecilia Carvalhal Braga de Andrade published in: Research Catalogue
    This exposition explores how performance-based artistic research can expose the constructedness of gender identity by placing the body in tension with resistant materials and wearable prosthetics. Working with spray foam insulation as both sculptural surface and choreographic partner, I investigated how its artificiality, rigidity, and eventual fracture could function as metaphors for the instability of normative embodiment. What began as a struggle to inhabit a rigid foam body evolved into experiments with prosthetic extensions, where the material was reimagined as a collaborator that displaced gestures, layered images, and generated hybrid presences. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, drag performance practices, Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés, and Rebecca Horn’s prosthetic sculptures, the research stages a dialogue between body, material, and viewer. Documentation through video and photography further expanded the work, creating layered choreographies where prosthetics multiplied into digital traces. In this process, the foam bodies became what Lauren Elkin calls “art monsters”: excessive, disruptive forms that refuse coherence, insisting instead on incompleteness, transformation, and the possibility of imagining bodies otherwise.
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