Dora Arreola

Associate Professor of Theatre: Acting and Movement
Phone: (813) 974-2701
Email: darreola@usf.edu

Arreola has more than twenty years of professional experience as a theater and dance artist. She took part in Grotowski's Objective Drama Project at the University of California-Irvine in 1987, and was a participant at Grotowski's Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy until 1989. Arreola went on to pursue Suzuki training, contemporary dance and Butoh. She founded the experimental dance theatre company Mujeres en Ritual in 1999, and has worked as a performer, teacher, director and movement specialist in Mexico, the United States, Nicaragua, Canada, Poland and India. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2009.

With her company, she created a repertory of seven productions, often featured in diverse international festivals, such as Perfecto Luna at the 2001 Vancouver Fringe Festival, and El Sueño de Sor Juana at the 2003 NY International Fringe Festival. Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders toured in Mexico, in the United States at New WORLD Theater and Alternate ROOTS (2005), in Nicaragua at the 2006 Festival Internacional de Teatro, and in Montreal, Canada at Concordia University's 2007 Symposium on Interdisciplinary. Arreola premiered her latest solo work, I, Rumores Silencio, at the 2009 Meetings with Remarkable Women Festival in Brzezinka, Poland. She choreographed and performed Versalii Icones at Judson Church in New York City (2009). In addition, Arreola has directed more than 30 productions, including Cherrie Moraga's The Hungry Woman and Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid at UMass-Amherst, and Ananya Dance Theater's Daak at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis (2008).

Arreola was co-founder and academic coordinator of Centro de Artes Escénicas del Noroeste (Northwest Center for the Scenic Arts) in Mexico, and served on the academic committee to create the first undergraduate degree program in theater at the University of Baja California in 2005. She has taught workshops and masterclasses at universities and cultural institutions including: the Institute of Jerzy Grotowski, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst College, University of Minnesota, California State University-San Marcos, University of Baja California, California Center for the Arts, and Smith College.

Arreola has received grants from the Ford Foundation, Cultural Contact (US-Mexico Funds for Culture), and Fideicomiso para la Cultura de Mexico y Estados Unidos. She was a key collaborator on a bi-national theater project supported by the Animating Democracy Initiative (2000-03). She also received a commission from the National Performance Network (NPN/DTW) Suitcase Fund.