Renata Lamenza Epifanio (BR/IT) navigates between visual arts, performance, dance, costume, research, motherhood and education. Currently she is a PhD researcher at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp (RCA) with the project 'Corpo-Gambiarra: Costume, Dance and Politics of the Body'. In 2025, she also co-founded Compagnie Niks with Alice Erlanger and Chantal Boes, working interdisciplinarily between music, movement, words and languages, creating sensorial worlds to connect people. Their first piece 'Palavras' will premiere in 2026 at CC MUZE. Her project 'Talk to me' is on its 7th collaboration and has been performed at De Studio, Fountain Fest Festival and Queer Arts Festival, Antwerp among others. As a performer, she has collaborated with Khadija El Kharraz Alami, Merel Servers, Flávia Tapias and Alexandre Bado and co-founded and performed in the band Dona Joana for 10 years. As an educator, she has shared her methodology 'The Moving Costume: bodies as playgrounds' at Performact (PT), at the departments of Dance and Drama of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and the Costume department at RAFA. She worked as the artistic coordinator of the Master in Dance at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp from 2021 till 2024.
As an artist-researcher, she is concerned with expanding notions such as costume and dance, and her works use costume as a sensorial trigger, proposing it as an agent for movement and as a tool for activating a political body. In her installations/performances, she plays with the relationship between object-audience and audience-performer. She invites the audience for an immediate corporeal-sensorial dialogue with the object and the performer, relocating the protagonism from the work itself to the relation that is created between the work and the viewer. Since 2018, she acts as a researcher in the SOFA’s and has realized the following projects: 'Talk to me', 'Physicality in the Performing Arts', 'TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY' with Stefani Assandri and 'Researcher >1'.
Update: June 2025
photo (c) Wannes Cré