VIVER BRASIL ANNOUNCES LEADERSHIP CHANGES AND NEW DANCE PROJECT “REZAS & FOLHAS” (PRAYERS & LEAVES)
Viver Brasil is proud to announce leadership changes to support its mission to sustain the legacy of Afro-Brazilian dance, music, and culture through performance, education, community, and cultural engagement programs.
Viver Brasil’s Board of Directors is pleased to announce Natalie Marrero, as its Executive Director. She has served as interim Executive Director since October 2021.
Vera Passos, who served as Associate Artistic Director, has been appointed as Co-Artistic Director of Viver Brasil.
Viver Brasil’s 2022 - 2023 Board of Directors includes Kamaya Jones (Chair), Carol Frank (Treasurer), Nailah Lisa Morris (Secretary), Carolina Timóteo de Oliveira, Randall Belyea, Erin Carstensen, and Mason Williams. Luiz Badaró, Vera Passos, and Linda Yudin serve as board members, ex officio.
Viver’s Brasil is also excited to announce its newest project, “Rezas & Folhas” (Prayers and Leaves), a genre-defying original performance ritual led by Co-Artistic Director Vera Passos. This project highlights the importance of sacred herbalism and Afro-Brazilian traditions as urgently necessary interventions in the fight for climate justice.
LOS ANGELES, CA (November 29, 2022) - Natalie Marrero, who served as interim executive director for Viver Brasil from October 2021 to October 2022, has been appointed to serve permanently as executive director of the dance company. As a community organizer who is passionate about place-making for communities through dance and art practices, she has dedicated her career to expanding notions of how communities define culture. Natalie has experience leading Conga Kids, a non-profit whose mission is to promote social and emotional wellness through social dance, and Everybody Dance Now!, a national hip-hop and street dance organization. Marrero previously served as Viver Brasil’s executive director from January 2017 through July 2019 and as a fundraising & development consultant from April 2016 through January 2017. Marrero holds a B.A. in Dance and Urban Studies from Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, an M.S. in Urban Policy and Management from Milano, The New School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy, and an M.A. in Arts Management from Claremont Graduate University.
“I am very honored to be selected as the new Executive Director for Viver Brasil,” says Marrero. “This organization has always held a special place in my heart for many years. Together, we will continue to move forward as a global institution sharing Afro-Brazilian dance, music, and culture in communities and on stages across the world.”
Hailing from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, Vera Passos is a pioneering choreographer, seasoned master teacher, and acclaimed performer whose deep-seated relationship with Afro-Brazilian movement and music sets her apart in the field of contemporary dance. Her work bravely defies archaic categories of tradition and experimentation, locating the ancestral practices of her Black Bahian heritage as powerful expressions of spirit-body rife with artistic and political possibility. Passos says in her own words, “my culture is my inspiration. When I dance, my feet speak with the earth… bringing ancestral messages of joy, resistance, and transformation.” The Los Angeles Times called Passos “....exotic, strong…sylph-like.” Before joining Viver Brasil in 2010, Passos danced with the acclaimed Balé Foclorico da Bahia for 10 years as a principal dancer and has danced with the hailed Jorge Silva Dance Company.
“I am thrilled and grateful to be named Co-Artistic Director of Viver Brasil,” says Passos. “I appreciate our co-founders who have maintained deep connections to our sacred source and together with the executive team, who nurtured this new and exciting relationship with the company. I fully intend to carry the legacy forward and ignite new ways of creative envisioning as I boldly move the company forward.”
Rezas & Folhas is based on Passos’s unique creative approach–refined over thirty years of professional experience–which masterfully blends traditional Afro-Brazilian dances and rhythms with experimental choreography and poignant storytelling. Brazil has become the world’s most lethal country for environmental activists, especially those of Indigenous communities. R&F seeks to act as ritualized intervention against this reality, uplifting our sacred connection to earth–and the Black and Indigenous knowledge systems that preserve this wisdom–as key to our collective reimagining of alternate life-affirming futurities.
In addition to appointing a new executive director and co-artistic director, Viver Brasil has also announced its 2022-2023 Board Directors. Board members include Kamaya Jones (Chair), UX Research Leadership, Google, Co-Founder Theory Research + Insights; Carol Frank (Treasurer), Nailah Lisa Morris (Secretary), Dance Educator; Carolina Timóteo de Oliveira and Latin American Studies Scholar; Randall Belyea, General Manager California Repertory Theater; Erin Carstensen, Co-Director Community Roots, Charter School; Mason Williams, Global Head of Diversity, Mattel Inc.; Luiz Badaró, Vera Passos, and Linda Yudin serve as board members, ex officio.
About Viver Brasil:
Founded in 1997 by Co-Artistic Directors Linda Yudin and Luiz Badaró, Viver Brasil is a legacy-bearing Los Angeles institution with deep and ongoing ties to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Viver Brasil creates culturally rooted and aesthetically bold Afro-Brazilian dance theater with its signature blend of ancestral practices, street styles, and live music–addressing contemporary issues of racial and social inequity towards a radically reimagined future. To learn more about Viver Brasil, please visit www.viverbrasil.com. Follow Viver Brasil on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.