Alessandra Santiesteban

Born in Holguin/Cuba in 1985.

Alessandra Santiesteban is an author, researcher, theater producer and visual artist. She has lived in Madrid/Spain since 2018.

She holds an MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture (MPECV) (2019) from the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum and University of Castilla-La Mancha/Spain. She graduated from the University of the Arts, Havana/Cuba, with a degree in theater arts in 2010. She also studied journalism at the Eastern University, Santiago de Cuba/Cuba, for four years.

Her artwork is cross-disciplinary (combining media, writing and performance techniques across the humanities, history, archeology, architecture and ecology). For years, her documentary research has addressed the deconstruction of the Cuban revolutionary »paradigm« and how to link these work experiences to other contexts.

She has participated in important projects which promote Ibero-American theater, including Panorama/Sur, an intensive seminar for playwrights, and Experimenta/Sur, an international live arts platform, held in Buenos Aires/Argentina and Bogotá/Colombia respectively.

Santiesteban is a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba and the General Society of Authors and Publishers (Spain). Her work as a poet and playwright has been published by Cuban publishing houses including Ediciones UNION, Casa Editoria Abril, Ediciones La Luz and Ediciones Sinsentido.

In 2020, she co-founded The Trailer with Karina Pino, a space for research, mediation and creation of interdisciplinary actions. This collective has initiated projects investigating female problems such as the migratory experiences of Latin American women living in Europe in conditions of legal vulnerability, the relationship of their bodies to the new environment, and the social pressures suffered by many migrant women attempting to conform to certain stereotypes of beauty. The projects Cartographies of Daily Life (Nau Ivanow, performing arts creation center, Barcelona/Spain), I want to be a female animal (Carrozzerie | n.o.t, Rome/Italy) and The girl who opened cans with her mouth (Fleetstreet Theater Residence, Hamburg/Germany) were developed in 2021.

Santiesteban has five years of experience in developing initiatives in the Nuclear City, a community currently at risk of exclusion which was built for the workers of the Juraguá Electronuclear Power Plant, work on which was suspended in 1992. The Trailer is currently working on Juraguá, the path of blue waters, an artistic, community and environmental project supported by the Prince Claus Foundation and Goethe Institute. Santiesteban is one of the playwrights and film directors whose work was presented at the Cuban art exhibition coordinated by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR) at documenta fifteen in Kassel/Germany in 2022.