Ana Mendes

Born 1973 in Tomar/Portugal.

Ana Mendes is a writer and artist working and living in London/Great Britain and Berlin/Germany. She studied animation film at La Poudrière – École du Film d’Animation, Valence/France (2008), photography at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar/Germany (2012), and finished an MA in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2011).

She started to work as a writer, but gradually turned into visual arts. Her performance career started accidentally when she wrote Self-portrait, a play on her identity, in 2010. Since then, she develops projects in which she uses text, performance, sound, installation, video and photography in order to speak on subjects such as identity, language, and memory. Her work has been exhibited at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Chicago, IL/USA; Sophiensaele, Berlin; Peter Robertson Gallery, Alberta/Canada; Tanzquartier, Vienna/Austria; International Theaterfestival MESS, Saravejo/Bosnia; Kana Theatre, Sczeczin/Poland; Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou Cajarc/France; Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna; and The Barbican Centre, London. Her plays were translated into Bosnian, English, Spanish, Polish, and French.

Selected prizes and fellowships include: Writer-in-Residency City of Vienna through the Artists in Residence program of Kulturkontakt Austria and BMUKK (Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur) (2014); Prize of the Jury Sophiensaele, Festival 100 Grad Berlin; Act-Arriaga Prize at the Act Festival, Bilbao/Spain (2012); Second Prize Lift Off, Lift Art Gallery (2012); fellowship from 18. Internationalem Atelierprogramm der ACC Galerie und der Stadt Weimar (2012), and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2010).

www.anamendes.com