Lília Mestre (she, her) is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working in collaborative formats mainly in the fields of contemporary dance and choreography. Mestre works with scores, inter-subjective set-ups and other chance-induced processes as emancipatory artistic and pedagogical tools, which have been documented in various publications. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social-political reflection.

For the past 8 years, she has been working on the concept of ‘artificial friendship’ which has been the source for the creation of methodological structures (scores) for exchange and collaboration in artistic research settings.

From the black box to the white cube, the classroom, the auditorium, to the public space, she has been developing performative strategies to engage in the questions of presence and situatedness, and what kind of singularities appear between the individual, the collective, the cultural and the environmental.

Mestre was dedicated to the postgraduate program a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels, as Artistic Coordinator (2017-2022), as Core member (2014-17) and as Associate Program Curator (since 2008 ). a.pass as an institution researches on transdisciplinarity, self-organization and collaboration as modes of practice that challenge notions of ownership and knowledge production in a neoliberal economy. Mestre was latest Artistic Coordinator and co-founder of Art Laboratory Bains Connective in Brussels (1997-2017).

From 1994, Mestre has worked as a dancer, collaborator, dramaturge and/or researcher, namely with Vera Mantero, Les Ballets C. de la B. with Hans Van den Broeck and Christine de Smedt, Martin Nachbar, Kate Macintosh, Mette Edvardsen, Nikolaus Gansterer, Elke Van Campenhout, Kristien Van den Brande, Varinia Canto Vila, Heike Langsdorf – Radical_Hope, Daniel Kok and Miho Shimizu, David Helbich, Philippine Hoegen and Marcos Simões among others.

She also founded and was a member (1999- 2004) of the company Random Scream (with Davis Freeman to expose the eclectic elements of everyday culture with proposed lines of flight for dance, theatre, and other media.

Mestre’s own stage performances deconstruct western tropes while evoking other forms of relationality, ecologies and politics. They include: “Untitle me” (1999), “Missing Link” (2002), “Beyond Mary and Joseph” (2003), “Rendering”(2005), “(g)hosts” (2008), “Moving you” (2010) and “Ai! a choreographic project” co-authored with Marcos Simões (2015).

She is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary Dance, and co-director of LePARC cluster within the MILIEUX Institute for Arts Culture and Technology at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She was granted the The Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award 2023 for her research on expanded choreography Through Materialities, Movement and Description”.