Catalina Villanueva

Biography

Catalina is a professional actress (P. Universidad Católica de Chile). She holds an MA in Drama and Theatre Education from Warwick University, UK, and a PhD in Education from Trinity College Dublin. She currently lectures at the School of Theatre of P. Universidad Católica de Chile and at the Departamento de Teatro, Universidad de Chile, where she guides courses on Applied Theatre and Research.

She is a member of the Theatre and Education Research Group at Universidad de Chile. She was co-editor of the Teatro Journal between 2022 and 2024. In 2024 she received a grant to conduct action research on applied theatre with women diagnosed with breast cancer, resulting in an ethnotheatre production presented in Santiago, Chile. She also premiered her play “Apoptosis”, written and starred by her. Her most recent publications include the book Teatro para un Chile neoliberal (Theatre for a Neoliberal Chile, Rossel et al, 2024), and a chapter co-written with Carmel O’Sullivan as part of the Routledge Handbook of Arts and Global Development (Ware et al, 2024). Her research interests involve examining the potential of Drama in Education to foster critical pedagogy, teacher education, Applied Theatre in health contexts. She has been a member of AERG since 2014.