About
Teoma Naccarato is a choreographer and media artist, originally from Canada. Each hybrid performance-installation she creates is a microcosm: a site for interrogating the mediation of bodies and identities within techno-cultures. Her collaborative practice engages critically with surveillance and biomedical technologies, examining how these systems interrelate with cultural perceptions of health, agency, and embodiment. Working across live, livestream, durational, and one-to-one formats, she expands the frame of performance to probe the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of computational representation.
Since 2013, Naccarato has worked in long-term collaboration with composer and computer scientist John MacCallum to create performance-installations that explore the materiality and musicality of the heart. Together, they have developed bespoke biosensing systems and experimental scores that position the heart as a site of resistance to dominant notions of synchrony, coherence, and control in performance. Their work challenges normative constructions of intimacy and aliveness in computational and clinical systems, and has been featured in festivals and residencies internationally.
Building on this research, since 2016 they have facilitated Interstitial Listening—a transdisciplinary workshop and somatic listening practice that emerged from intensive engagement with biosensing, breathwork, and extended durational performance. This practice continues to evolve through community-based experimentation and is central to Naccarato’s inquiry into the aesthetics and ethics of sensing.
In her scholarly research, Naccarato interrogates how movement is rendered intelligible—and valuable—across artistic, clinical, and computational systems. Drawing on feminist technoscience, new materialist theory, and process philosophy, her writing examines the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of sensing, representation, and embodiment, with particular attention to how dominant epistemologies shape what forms of life are recognized, measured, or excluded. Her work contributes to growing transdisciplinary conversations around the politics of visibility, the infrastructures of knowledge production, and the future of embodied research methodologies.
Naccarato’s scholarship has been published in journals such as Dance and Somatic Practices, Performance Research, Leonardo, Tempo, and Performance Philosophy. She is committed to fostering critical, collective inquiry into the conditions and cultures of research themselves. From 2021–2022, she co-led a virtual reading and discussion group on race, colonialism, and diaspora at the intersection of dance and computing, emphasizing transversal, diffractive approaches to reading across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Since 2018, she has co-run the Provocations Project, curating open calls and discussions on systemic inequality in research and pedagogy. These lines of inquiry continue to inform her current work toward experimental frameworks for rethinking movement, meaning, and institutional change.
As a Research Fellow at Falmouth University’s Centre for Blended Realities (CBR), Naccarato is currently writing her first monograph on movement philosophy and leading practice-based and scholarly research at the intersections of choreography, technology, and philosophy. Ongoing initiatives include the Transversal Imaginaries platform – co-hosted by CBR and the Centre for Pedagogy Futures – which holds space for long-term, radical reimaginings of research culture and institutions. As part of this she facilitates a Transversal Reading Group on Movement Philosophy and a public seminar series on Movement & Immersion.
Naccarato holds an MFA, PhD, and Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dance. Her work has been recognized through fully funded fellowships and artist grants in Canada, the UK, and Germany. She has participated in full-time residencies at institutions such as IRCAM (Paris), CLOUD/DansLab (The Hague), Lake Studios (Berlin), CNMAT (UC Berkeley), and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program (San Francisco). Alongside her artistic and research practice, she has held teaching positions at universities across Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe, leading undergraduate and postgraduate courses in choreography, contemporary dance, multimedia performance, screendance, and performance philosophy.
Choreography
Click on the images below for descriptions, videos, and images from each piece.
Publications
Naccarato, T. (2022) “Book Review: The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. 14 (1), 129-133. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00067_5
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum, J. (2020) “Cutting together-apart (une greffe)”. Performance Research. 25 (5), 135-142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2019.42234
Naccarato, T. (2019) Re/contextualization: On the critical appropriation of technologies as artistic practice. PhD Thesis. Coventry University, UK.
MacCallum, J. and Naccarato, T. (2019) “Collaboration as Differentiation: Rethinking Interaction Intra-Actively”. Performance Philosophy. 4 (2), 410-433. DOI: 10.21476/pp.2019.42234
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum J. (2019) “The Touch of the Stethoscope: Shaping Context in Intimate Performance”. TEMPO. 73 (287), 71-75. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298218000669
Naccarato, T. (2019). “Book Review: Radio Strainer: Part Two of the Kinesthetic Archive”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. 11 (1). 129-135. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.11.1.129_5
Naccarato, T. (2018) “Artistic Practice as Research: A Genealogical Account”. A World of Muscles, Bone & Organs: Research and Scholarship in Dance. eds. Ellis, S., Blades, H., and Waelde, C. 435–455. available at: https://bit.ly/3Jdg5jj
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum, J. (2017) “Critical Appropriations of Biosensors in Artistic Practice”. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO ‘17). London. 1-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3077981.3078053
Kirk, P., Naccarato, T., and MacCallum, J. (2017) “Intimate Listening”. Performance Research. 22 (3), 57–60. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1348589
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum, J. (2016) “From Representation to Relationality: Bodies, Biosensors and Mediated Environments”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. 8 (1), 55–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.8.1.57_1
Naccarato, T., MacCallum, J., Boudou, L., and Pelinka, S. (2017) “Peripheral Encounters”. Leonardo. 50 (3). 240-241. Project MUSE. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/662394
MacCallum, J. and Naccarato, T.J. (2015) “The Impossibility of Control: Real-Time Negotiations with the Heart”. Proceedings of the Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts. London. 184-191. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2015.19
*The full, pre-print version of each article is available upon request. Please email: teomajn@gmail.com
Project Websites
Over the past decade, Teoma Naccarato has developed two main bodies of artistic work: III and Im/mediations, as well as a somatic listening practice called Interstitial Listening. The website for each project serves as a living archive, with documentation and announcements from past and upcoming performances and workshops.
Click on the images below to be redirected to the website for each project, or view the individual performances and installations in the next section.
III is a series of performance-installations that explore the materiality and musicality of the heart. Using bespoke biosensing systems, durational structures, and experimental scores, this series examines how the rhythms of the body resist dominant logics of coherence, synchrony, and control. In these works, intimacy, aliveness, and presence are measured not by productivity or transparency, but by friction, delay, and the subtle traces of what remains.
Im/mediations investigates how we exist together in mediated and virtual contexts. Through livestreams, multi-camera installations, and fragmented bodies in space, we explore stillness, silence, and absence as forms of connection. These works ask: when presence is distributed, incomplete, or deferred, what persists between us? How do our interactions retain meaning when filtered through technology?
Interstitial Listening is a multi-sensory listening practice, aimed at tuning awareness of how rhythms emerge in movement and music. It is a technique for exploring and reimagining habits of relation between performers and media in real-time – on stage and off.