Rosana Barragan

Choreographer / guest artist

Rosana is a performing artist from Colombia. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Social Studies from Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and a Master’s degree in Dance from the Laban Centre in London. She is also certified in Yoga, Participatory Arts and Somatic Movement Therapy and Education. She has worked as professor at Universidad Javeriana and Academia Superior de Artes de Bogota in her native country and during the past three years at Saint Mary’s College of California. She has worked as a teacher, guest artist and dancer with the Latin Ballet of Virginia since 1998. Rosana has been around dance since birth, inheriting the art form from her mother. Her technique evolves from her life experience in movement, combining her European training in contemporary dance with her early training in classical ballet, her Latin American roots, Yoga and a high influence of the world of Somatics (Bartenieff, Body Mind Centering, Laban Movement Analysis and the Alexander Technique).

As a choreographer, she questions and explores new approaches to the body in art practice and creates challenges for her work to be defined outside the realm of dance. Her artistic work focuses on social and political issues and her aesthetic concerns move her to build special sites and create different audience perspectives. Her site-specific works have received several awards and have been performed on sites such as: the Thames River beaches in London, parks, plazas, churches, roofs, glass cubes and art galleries. She has received various grants for choreography from the Government of Colombia and in 2006 obtained the National Dance Research Award given by the Colombian Ministry of Culture. She has publications in Arts Journals and Dance books in Colombia and her artistic work has been shown in Central America, South America, Europe and the United States. She owns Calliope Dance Studio for children in San Francisco, California.