Cecilia Carvalhal is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her work looks at identity as something that shifts and contradicts itself, shaped by the friction between the body, the spaces it moves through, and the norms placed upon it. Working across performance, wearable sculpture, and video, she treats the body as a place where cultural forces meet, leave their marks, and can be unsettled.

Her practice continues a path opened by artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who understood the body as a way of knowing. Carvalhal builds wearable sculptures that can be inhabited. These structures hold the body in and let it expand, sometimes within the same gesture. Inside them, the performer is shaped by the material and shapes it in return, and identity takes form through that encounter.

Drawing on intersectional feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, she asks how patriarchal and colonial systems decide which bodies can be read and who gets to belong. In her performances, the moments when a body does not quite fit its mold, when it slips, overflows, or transforms, become places of resistance and possibility.

The camera is part of this work. She uses it as an extension of the performing body, a double that helps produce presence and meaning while also keeping a record.

Her performances include It’s Natural, Cord of Steps, and Between Movements, presented in her MFA thesis exhibition I AM (2025) at Lord Hall Gallery, University of Maine, where the gallery became a participatory studio. Her work has also been shown at MCA Gallery in Phoenix and in the Live Lens exhibition in South Paris, Maine (2026). She is currently directing her first feature documentary, The Lobsterman.

Carvalhal holds a BA in Theatre Directing from UFRJ and an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Maine, where she is now a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies. She also brings more than 13 years of experience as an assistant director and script supervisor on productions for Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Universal Pictures, and the BBC.