In this presentation, Catalina Alvarez will explore the history of the intersection between art and engagement in the North American context, highlighting the role of protest and participation within performative practices. Drawing on her teaching and artistic experience, Catalina Alvarez will focus on how art has been used as a means of engaging with communities and social issues, including in the context of formal education. These practices contribute to refocusing the purposes of art on the execution of activities such as readings, workshops, and debates, rather than the production of artistic objects, as has been the paradigm in Western art in recent centuries.

Catalina Alvarez is a professor and director of the Art and Engagement program in the Visual Arts department at Fordham University. In this context, she explores engagement with communities, social issues, and other real-life issues as a form of artistic expression. She is a director of choreographed films and experimental musicals. Her work frequently explores themes of transportation between places and the transformation between genres and mediums. Catalina Alvarez's films have been screened at festivals such as Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, New Orleans, and Palm Springs, and at venues such as ICA Philadelphia, the San Diego Art Institute, and the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. She has received grants and participated in research and creative residencies at institutions such as the Flaherty Seminar, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Rooftop Films, Flux Factory, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Catalina Alvarez recently curated, hosted, and produced Screen Play, an intermedia event presented in November 2024 at the Center for Performance Research in New York. As part of this event, which combined dance, music, and film screenings with a series of readings by contemporary artists, Alvarez presented "App"s, a short story and choreographic event of the same name. This short story is part of the collection "Vagaries," to be edited by Catarina Real and published by Edições da Ruína with the support of Fordham University.

The presentation is part of the program "Sounds, Images and Words – Transatlantic Dialogues," organized by Catarina Real with the support of the Luso-American Foundation, and partially hosted by the School of Arts. Admission is free.