she/her

Celia Vara

Celia Vara is a psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher specializing in brain–body interaction, body culture, and sensory studies. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University (2022–2025) and holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Concordia University (2019) (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). Her doctoral dissertation, "Kinesthetic Knowledge and Corporal Agency", received an “excellent” distinction in the oral defense. Her master’s thesis, Feminist Video Art in the 1970s in Spain, was awarded the First Prize in Gender and Research by Jaume I University in 2013.

She has served as Principal Investigator on multiple research, knowledge mobilization, and public scholarship projects funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), the Réseau d’études féministes du Québec (RéQEF), and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (IGSF, McGill University). Her work reflects a sustained commitment to connecting academic research with broader publics and to advancing feminist, publicly engaged scholarship through curatorial initiatives and somatic workshops.

Her research and media work have been published in venues such as Feral Feminisms, the Institute for Research on Women (Rutgers University), McGraw Hill Editorial, Arte y Políticas de Identidad, Humanities and Entropy (MDPI, Switzerland), Performance Research (Taylor & Francis), the Journal of Embodied Research (University of Huddersfield, UK), and Asparkia Investigació Feminista (Q1 Arts and Humanities, Q1 Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Q1 Interdisciplinary). In recognition of her pedagogical excellence, she received the 2024 Teaching Excellence Award at McGill University.

Celia Vara has been appointed to co-supervise doctoral dissertations in the PhD program in Art Studies and Practices (Doctorat en études et pratiques des arts, DÉPA) at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). In 2024, she was accredited by ANECA (Spain’s National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation) as Profesora Contratada Doctora and Profesora de Universidad Privada, a requirement for eligibility for faculty positions in Spanish public universities.

A member of Concordia University’s Centre for Sensory Studies (co-director David Howes), her research explores embodied and sensory forms of knowledge, with a focus on kinesthesia, somatic experience, and bodily agency through qualitative, embodied methodologies. Her working languages are Spanish (native), English, and French.