© Sónia Godinho
Zia Soares is a theatre director and actress. In her work, developed between Africa and Europe, she obsessively experiments with the construction of new dramaturgies rooted in the poetics of orality and divergent (in)corporalities, where the word is a manifestation of images — images that embody, that neither imitate nor reproduce, but that act. Her practice investigates the unburied colonial dead and their legacy, dignity in death, repatriation and restitution, mourning, trance and ceremony, and performance as a force of agency.
The daughter of an Angolan mother and a Timorese father, she was born in Bié, Angola, in 1972, and is the first Black woman to have assumed the artistic directorship of a theatre company in Portugal. She studied Philosophy at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon and completed a Master's degree in Performing Arts at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. At the beginning of her artistic career she studied ballet and percussion with the National Ballet Company of Guinea-Bissau, circus arts with the Amsterdam Balloon Company (Netherlands), and theatre with Teatro Praga, of which she was one of the founding members, working as a director, theatre director and actress.
She is Artistic Director of Teatro GRIOT since its foundation — a Lisbon-based company whose programme is organised around reflections on the construction and interrogation of contemporary Europe, arising from the lived experiences of its members as artists, Black people, immigrants and foreigners. She is also co-founder of sowing_arts, a structure that promotes projects at the intersection of the arts with intersectionality, botany, ecofeminism, agroecology, and science and technology. She created and directed the first performances produced and performed exclusively by Black women in Portugal: Gestuário I, produced by INMUNE (Instituto da Mulher Negra em Portugal), and Gestuário II, co-produced by INMUNE/BoCA Biennial of Contemporary Arts.
Among her most recent works are O riso dos necrófagos, written and directed by Zia Soares, co-produced by Teatro GRIOT/Culturgest, awarded Best Show 2021/2022 at the Premio Internazionale Teresa Pomodoro (Milan, Italy); FANUN RUIN, written and directed by Zia Soares, co-produced by Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/sowing_arts; Pérola sem rapariga, directed by Zia Soares, text by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, co-produced by sowing_arts, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, apap Feminist Futures; and ARUS FEMIA, written and directed by Zia Soares, produced by sowing_arts, co-produced by Netos de Bandim, Teatro Municipal do Porto, STATION for contemporary dance.
In film, she has worked with João Botelho, Avelina Prat, Latifa Said, José Barahona, António Castelo, Pocas Pascoal and Pedro Filipe Marques. She was pre-selected for the PLATINO Ibero-American Cinema Awards 2025 in the category of Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Sobreviventes, directed by José Barahona, a DAVID & GOLIAS production.
She leads Performing Arts workshops in the PALOP countries and with Black communities in the greater Lisbon area, and regularly participates as a guest speaker and lecturer at events organised by artistic and academic institutions.
In 2022, at the invitation of the President of the Republic, she took part in the "Mulheres de Coragem" programme. That same year she was recognised by the Association of Women Entrepreneurs Europe/Africa in the area of Performance. In 2021 and 2022, the Bantumen Powerlist recognised her as one of the 100 most influential Black personalities in the Lusophone world.
been the artistic director of Teatro GRIOT since its foundation. She is also co-founder of SOWING_ARTS, an organization founded by multidisciplinary artists, which promotes projects with a particular focus on the intersection of the arts with issues of intersectionality, botany, ecofeminism and agroecology, and science and technology.
Zia Soares is an artist supported by apap – Feminist Futures, Creative Europe Program of the European Union.