Dr Teoma Naccarato

Lead, Centre for Pedagogy Futures & Research Fellow, Centre for Blended Realities

I work across choreography, philosophy, and technology, examining how movement is sensed, represented, and valued in contemporary culture. I approach choreography as a way of organising relationships between bodies, technologies, and differentiated ways of knowing. As Lead for the Centre for Pedagogy Futures and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Blended Realities at Falmouth University, I develop artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical approaches to embodiment in technologically mediated environments.

I create durational performances that unfold over hours or even days, situated within installations that incorporate continuous surveillance, biosensing, and biofeedback systems. I experiment with how audiences encounter each work, foregrounding the uneven and partial ways it can be perceived—from different vantage points and through mediated representations of live action. Since 2013, I’ve worked closely with composer and computer scientist John MacCallum on a series of projects about the heart—not just as a biological organ, but as something that can resist notions of control, measure, and synchrony. Together, we also run Interstitial Listening, a somatic and compositional methodology that explores how rhythms emerge between bodies, technologies, and environments in real time.

In my writing, I draw on feminist and philosophical approaches to think about how movement becomes something we can measure, analyse, and understand—especially through technology. I have developed ideas such as “critical appropriation” (reusing technologies to expose their underlying assumptions) and “the choreographic gaze” (how distributed systems encode what kinds of movement matter). My work has been published in journals including Performance Research, Leonardo, Dance and Somatic Practices, and Performance Philosophy.

A central strand of my work is the development of research platforms for collective inquiry, through which I extend these concerns into pedagogy and institutional practice. I co-run the Provocations Project and convene transversal reading groups and seminar series that bring together researchers across the arts, sciences, and humanities. Through these initiatives, I develop new formats for collaborative research and shape research agendas at the intersection of movement, technology, and critical theory.

External Links

Naccarato

Contact details

    Qualifications

    Qualifications

    Year Qualification Awarding body
    2023 PostDoc Dance Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University
    2019 PhD Dance Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University
    2011 MFA Dance & Technology The Ohio State University
    2004 BFA Contemporary Dance Concordia University

    Research Interests

    Research interests and expertise

    My research weaves together artistic practice and critical theory to explore how bodies, technologies, and temporal structures come to matter in performance. At the heart of this inquiry are three interrelated themes: the critical appropriation of technologies, the abstraction and representation of time, and what I call the choreographic gaze. 

    In long-standing collaboration with composer / computer scientist John MacCallum, I explore how technologies—whether clocks, ECGs, algorithms, or ideas—can be repurposed as artistic tools and conceptual provocations. I define critical appropriation as the deliberate recontextualization of these technologies to examine the values they encode and the systems they uphold. Rooted in feminist, new materialist, and process philosophies, my work emphasizes relationality: how bodies and boundaries are not given, but made—and remade—through performance. 

    Projects like III: Once Returned (2023), a 72-hour livestream in which every breath and gesture was scored, explore how timekeeping devices choreograph human and nonhuman rhythms. Alongside this, I co-developed Interstitial Listening, a somatic technique for attuning to subtle shifts in movement and sound, fostering new modes of togetherness across media. 

    My current book project develops the concept of the choreographic gaze: a pluri-sensorial lens through which motion is parsed, framed, and made meaningful across disciplines. From dance to data science, this gaze reveals how movement is not just observed—but shaped—by the systems that render it intelligible. Across all my work, I pursue transdisciplinary, ethically attuned approaches to performance, research, and pedagogy that ask: how do we move, and who gets to decide what movement matters? 

    Research Topics: 

    • Choreography, Dance, and Movement Studies 
    • Durational and installation-based performance 
    • Critical appropriations of technology in/as artistic practice 
    • The “choreographic gaze” 
    • Interstitial Listening 
    • Performance Philosophy 

    Areas of teaching

    • Dance & Choreography: Choreography, improvisation, contemporary technique, dance for camera 
    • Media & Intermedia Arts: Video editing, interactive design (Isadora), projection mapping, biosensors in performance 
    • Performance Art: Installation, durational, virtual, and one-on-one performance 
    • Critical Theory & Philosophy: Dance studies, critical technology studies, philosophies of movement and embodiment, transversal methodologies 

    Professional Engagement

    Engagement with professional associations and societies

    • Co-Director, Provocations Project (2018–present) Curates international discourse and events on the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of movement analysis and representation across disciplines. Activities include online forums, conference panels, and video series. 
    • Assistant Editor, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2016–2018, 2022–2023) 
    • Peer Reviewer for: Leonardo Journal,  International Journal of Screendance, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, MOCO, ICMC, etc. 
    • Co-Facilitator, Interstitial Listening (2021–present) Somatic technique workshops delivered across Europe and North America, supporting artists and researchers in developing attunement to emergent rhythms in performance. 
    • Mentorship for Professional Artists: SomoS Artist Residency (2023–2024),  Digital Body Lab, Lake Studios Berlin (2022) Artist Talks & Invited Presentations on choreography, technology, and ethics in artistic research at institutions including: Centre for Dance Research (Coventry University), Hamburg University of Music and Theatre (HfMT), Arizona State University, Synthesis Center, Barbican Guildhall School, UC Berkeley, Department of Music 
    • Co-Moderator, Dance Computing Studies Reading Group (2020–2021) Led themed reading rotations on race, colonialism, and ethics in movement and computing practices, and developed resources on critical digital praxis and transdisciplinary collaboration, hosted on multiple platforms and research communities.