Niurca E. Márquez

Honors College


Email: niumarqu@fiu.edu

Biography

Niurca Márquez (she/ella) is a movement artist/researcher and author. As a trained somatic educator, she uses her body-centered work to service communities undergoing processes of healing and self-realization. A Latinx artist and activist on the margins advocating for silenced voices, she is particularly interested in notions of identity, cultural memory, ritual and the body within a contemporary framework, as well as the multiple layers of communication and understanding in movement practices that lead to liaisons with political and social discourse.

She is an Assistant Teaching Professor with a shared line in the Honors College and the Department of Religious Studies and holds an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and an MFA in Choreography. As the Honors College COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) Faculty Fellow, she facilitates partnerships that engage in diversified problem-solving rooted in intercultural communication and cross-cultural understandings. Niurca's pedagogical approach includes the transposition of Practice as Research models, derived from her studio practice, in devising frameworks for transdisciplinarity in the classroom. She is currently working on a future publication on the Arará in Cuba and how dance is a dynamic space in which to understand cosmology and religious practice.

Niurca directs Cultural Arts Exchange, an organization dedicated to artist services and programs centered on social accountability. She is also a founding member of FARO, a collaborative whose vision it is to create a space for creative/research that gives voice to thinkers and doers independently of institutional representation; work that is of and for the margin, and that recognizes the margin as a source of understanding and shifting perspectives. As an active movement artist, she is part of Pioneer Winter Collective, a company of allies that democratize performance through unexpected bodies in unexpected places, and D-Projects, a physical theater company directed by Teo Castellanos, elevating an “AfroRican Punk” aesthetic which breaks away from traditional Eurocentric proscenium theater and returns to the ritual and interactive performance circle