028 Sip & Chat: Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón

Welcome back to LNXdance with your Co-Hosts, Marcus & Mari! We are excited to continue our celebration of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month with the wonderful Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón!

Instagram: lourdesdelmar_

Puerto Rican movement artist, Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón, is committed to creating immersive artistic explorations that provoke curiosity, heighten sensory awareness, and demand attention. Central to their practice is a belief in fostering genuine connections between art maker and audience through raw emotional experiences. Their work often carries a sense of urgency, utilizing art as a powerful tool for expression and communication, facilitating both healing and exploration for all audiences.

As a Queer Latine woman, Lourdes is dedicated to crafting unapologetic art that encourages deeper thought, heightened emotional engagement, and fearless life experiences. A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, they are currently pursuing an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research at Washington University in St. Louis includes but is not limited to, dance on the body of the Puerto Rican and the histories, lineages, and politics that inform Puerto Rican dance encounters. The research largely considers national identity as a topic of discussion questioning the diaspora, the nation’s sovereignty, nationalism, and art as activism. 

They are the recipient of the 2024/2025 RADicle Croft Residency and  Artist-in-Residence at the Tyson Research Center in the Spring of 2024. They will present an in-progress research essay, "Cuir (Queer) Reggaetón and the Call for Cuir (Queer) Embodied Puerto Rican Identity," at this year’s Dance Studies Association conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Their piece a meating, choreographed with Tess Losada Miner, was recently performed at the Fifth Biennial Graduate Student Art History Symposium Making Contact: Haptic, Temporal, Spatial, and Conceptual Connections. In 2023, their piece Un recuerdo del presente was commissioned to be performed at SUMMIT: THROUGH HER RISE at the University of Michigan Department of Dance through a cross-campus partnership between the U-M Museum of Art, the U-M Arts Initiative, and the College of LSA.

We are so happy to share their story with you. Comparte el amor with our guest, and let us know your favorite part of this chat.