Awilda Rodríguez Lora

Awilda Rodríguez Lora is a contemporary Puerto Rican dancer, performance artist, choreographer, and storyteller. Her art focuses on women, sexuality, and self-determination. It also incorporates dialogues of colonial legacies and the identities of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez Lora has presented her work throughout North America, South America, and the Caribbean. The artist cites mainstream media as an influence in her work. She is currently the academic director of the Dance Program at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce, a central zone of San Juan. Scholars and curators such as Sarah G. Sharp, Harmony Bench, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Paloma Martinez-Cruz, and Elizabeth Currans have analyzed her work and interviewed her.

Biography Rodríguez Lora was born in Veracruz, Mexico to Puerto Rican parents who were traveling through the United States and Mexico. Her father studied chiropractic care in New York shortly after Rodríguez Lora was born. Her mother works as a caretaker and an occupational therapist. She has two younger brothers, both of whom were born in Puerto Rico. At the age of 16, Rodríguez Lora began to study dance in Santurce, Puerto Rico. After six months, she was elected to join the studio's company. During her time in the dance company, Rodríguez Lora faced hardships due to her weight and being typecast as a "voluptuous" dancer. In an interview in the leading Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día in 2014, Rodríguez-Lora described her experiences as a queer Puerto Rican woman artist as "vivir entre identidades" (living between identities). In 2018, Rodríguez Lora was selected to participate in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, a response to the ravages of Hurricane Maria that allowed artists to sustain their artistic practices.

Performances Since 2013, Rodríguez Lora has been performing iterations of a piece entitled La Mujer Maravilla (a Puerto Rican iteration of William Moulton Marston's Wonder Woman as a feminist icon) in which Rodríguez Lora explores motherhood, community, and gender in a diasporic and Caribbean context marked by poverty, financial austerity, and natural disasters, highlighting the concept of "sustento" (sustenance). This project was conceived out of her own desire to become a mother. She created this project as part of a residency program in Carolina, Puerto Rico at Patio Taller, an arts space led by Afro-diasporic siblings Mulowayi Iyaye Nonó and Mapenzi Chibale Nonó, better known as Las Nietas de Nonó.

In 2014, Rodríguez Lora participated in Call & Response, a dynamic of Black Women & Performance at Antioch College curated by Gabrielle Civil featuring the artists Duriel E. Harris, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Rosamond S. King, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Miré Regulus. In 2015, she collaborated with disabled artist of color, dancer, and choreographer Barak adé Soleil at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, choreographing the piece Objects are objects. In 2018, Rodríguez Lora was part of a series titled Cuerpxs Radicales: Radical Bodies in Performance at the Brooklyn Museum. In March 2019 and September 2020, she had artists residencies at the Ohio State University, as scholar Paloma Martínez-Cruz has discussed.

Scholarly and media reception Rodríguez-Lora has received substantial critical reception, including interviews, scholarly analysis, and coverage in the most important newspaper in Puerto Rico, El Nuevo Día. Scholar Guillermo Rebollo-Gil has analyzed La Mujer Maravilla. Visual artist and journalist Karla Claudio-Betancourt has written about Rodríguez-Lora in relation to other feminist Puerto Rican artists and cultural organizers, including Gisela Rosario Ramos (Macha Colón), María José, Noemí Segarra, Carla Torres Trujillo, and Las Nietas de Nonó.