Distinctions
The 100 most influential black personalities in Portuguese-speaking countries
2021
Zia Soares, the first black woman artistic director of a theater company in Portugal, was born in Bié, Angola.
Among her most recent works stands out “O riso dos necrófagos” - text, dramaturgy and staging; “Luminoso afogado” – adaptation, dramaturgy and staging; and the first performances produced and performed exclusively by black women in Portugal: “Gestuário I”, produced by INMUNE (Institute of Black Women in Portugal) and “Gestuário II”, co-produced by INMUNE/BoCA-Biennial of Contemporary Arts – creation and direction.
Association of Women Entrepreneurs Europe/Africa
6th Edition | Hotel Palácio, Estoril
2022
Zia Soares is one of the women awarded in the field of “ACTING” for her unique path in the Performing Arts in Africa and Europe, highlighting the fact that she is the first black woman artistic director of a theater company in Portugal and for being the author and director of the show “O riso dos necrófagos” distinguished as “Best Show 2021/2022” within the scope of the Premio Internazionale Teresa Pomodoro in Milan, Italy.
Photo by: Estelle Valente
Directed and performed by Zia Soares
Best Show
2021/2022
Premio Internazionale Teresa Pomodoro | Milan, Italy
LINK
The 100 most influential black personalities in Portuguese-speaking countries
2022
The show “O Riso dos Necrófagos / The Laughter of the Scavengers”, directed and staged by Zia Soares and co-produced by Teatro Griot and Culturgest, was awarded with the Premio Internazionale Teresa Pomodoro for Best Show 2021/2022.
Later this year, Zia premiered “Uma Dança das Florestas /A Dance of the Forests”, one of the most famous theater plays by Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1986), about “what it is to be independent and free”; she presented “O Riso dos Necrófagos / The Laughter of the Scavengers” at the No’hma Theater, in Milan, and at the Biennale of São Tomé and Príncipe; and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon, she premiered the performance “Fanun Ruin”, which proposes a reflection on the colonial past, identity and mourning.