🇵🇠performance maker, actor-pedagogue, phd in performance studies student
Olive (Uleb) Nieto
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As a performance maker, actor-pedagogue, and researcher, my practice inhabits the intersection of embodiment, education, and experimentation. I approach the body not simply as an instrument of performance but as a living archive and site of inquiry, capable of generating knowledge across physical stages, digital environments, and the liminal spaces between them. Whether creating original work, performing a role, or facilitating a laboratory, I investigate how stories are constructed, embodied, and transformed within shifting cultural and technological landscapes.
Collaboration is central to my creative and pedagogical practice. In both rehearsal rooms and learning spaces, I cultivate conditions that balance individual agency with collective awareness, remaining attentive to the networks of relationship that extend beyond the immediate moment of performance. As an educator, I strive to foster environments that are simultaneously rigorous, supportive, and critically engaged, where discipline and self-motivation coexist with empathy and care. Within these spaces, critique becomes a shared practice of growth, while reflection and reflexivity serve as foundations for artistic development and scholarly inquiry.
My research and creative work span stage, film, and television acting, performance-as-research, physical dramaturgy, and emerging forms of digital and online performance. Guided by an ongoing curiosity about the capacities and limits of the body, I explore how movement disciplines beyond conventional actor training—including gymnastics, freediving, mermaiding, and juggling—can expand performer training methodologies and inform the creation of solo performance. As a PhD student in Performance Studies, I bring these strands together through a practice that bridges artistic exploration and scholarly investigation. Ultimately, my work seeks to transform embodied curiosity into critical knowledge while remaining grounded in a deep commitment to collective human experience.