About

Joana Pereira da Costa is a performance-based multidisciplinary artist working between London and Lisbon, whose work unfolds at the intersection of body, memory, and resistance. Drawing upon lived experience, feminist philosophy, and poetic inquiry, her practice engages performance as both method and metaphor—a space where the self is simultaneously deconstructed and reassembled. For Joana, the body is not merely a subject of representation but an active, thinking agent: a site of rupture and revelation, inscribed with personal and political histories. 

Her performances often operate as intimate acts of witnessing, where language gives way to gesture, and presence becomes a provocation. Through the careful orchestration of sensory elements—particularly smell, texture, and sound—Joana subverts the ocular-centric traditions of Western art, reawakening neglected modes of perception as tools of knowledge and empathy. These sensorial interventions are not ornamental; they are critical strategies that expand the audience’s capacity to feel, to remember, and to reimagine. 

Working across live performance, moving image, and installation, Joana’s work meditates on the tension between exposure and concealment, structure and chaos, silence and articulation. It often inhabits liminal spaces—between theatre and gallery, public and private, trauma and transformation—seeking to make visible the invisible architectures that govern female experience.