Cecília de Lima

Biography

Cecília de Lima is currently an Assistant Professor in the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes at the School of Dance – Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon.

Since 2017, she has been an integrated researcher at the Institute of Ethnomusicology – Music and Dance (INET-md), where she develops practice-based research focused on the relationship between choreographic creation and dramaturgy, phenomenology, cognitive sciences, somatic practices, arts education, and dance within technological expansion. Her work has been published in internationally circulated journals and presented at various scientific conferences.

She serves on the Scientific and Editorial Boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Revista Brasileira de Estudos em Dança, Revista RED – Revista de Estud(i)os em Dança, and Revista Cena (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul).

She has been invited to teach at multiple universities, notably:
– Faculty of Human Kinetics, University of Lisbon – BA and PhD in Dance (2016–2023);
– Universidade Aberta – PhD in Digital-Media Art (Lisbon);
– Amsterdam Faculty of Arts – Modern Dance (NL);
– Arnhem ArtEZ Faculty of Arts (NL) – Dance.

From 2022 to 2024, she served as Co-Principal Investigator of the project Ghost Dance: A methodology to analyse dance movement in interaction with virtual reality, funded by FCT (Ref.: EXPL/ART-PER/1238/2021).

She began her professional career as a choreographer and dancer in 1999, collaborating with several European creators. From 2001 to 2008, she was co-founder of the company Canvas Performing Art (NL), where she co-created various interdisciplinary performances.

She earned her Master’s degree in Choreography from ArtEZ Faculty of the Arts (Netherlands), where she developed the practice-based research Sensorial Art – moving through the vertigo of affection, supported by a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship.

In 2017, she completed her PhD at the University of Lisbon – Faculty of Human Kinetics, specialising in Dance, with full funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Her dissertation, Transversal Thought – The Art of Experiencing the World as the Paradox of Movement, stems from artistic-practice-based research in which she developed a choreographic research methodology entitled Trans-Meaning – between sensorimotor meaning and verbal meaning.