Luisa Bieri Rios, MA
Assistant Director of AEA
Globalization and Community Responses in Argentina Academic Coordinator
MA, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; BA, Smith College
As an undergraduate at Smith College, Luisa studied abroad for a year in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her coursework at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella contributed to her BA in Latin American Literature and Theater. While in Argentina, she volunteered with H.I.J.O.S. (Children for Identity and Justice and against Forgetting and Silence), an activist organization of children of the “disappeared” during the Argentinean military dictatorship of 1976-1983. This experience led her to direct Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa upon her return to Smith, which won Smith’s directing award.
In 2002, Luisa joined AEA as the Program Assistant for the Comparative Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe program and then became AEA Assistant Director from 2003-04. In 2005, she received her MA in Comparative Women’s Studies from Universiteit Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where her research explored how participatory theater as a cultural practice influences social and political movements. Luisa returned to the USA and was awarded an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship to create cross-cultural arts programming with immigrants, refugees, and longstanding residents of southeast Baltimore at Creative Alliance, an award-winning art center, where she worked until 2010. As a theater director in the USA and abroad, she has published for Community Arts Network, and trained with the late Brazilian director Agosto Boal.
In 2011, Luisa returned to AEA, and to her hometown of Yellow Springs to raise her son with her Argentinean spouse, whom she first met while studying abroad.
Questions for Luisa may be addressed to: lbieri@antioch.edu or 937-769-1014.
