she/her

Celia Vara

With a background and professional practice in psychology, Celia Vara is an artist, educator, curator, and postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Her work bridges feminist theory, research-creation, and embodied methodologies. She explores kinesthesia, movement, and how agency and feminist resistance emerge through the body, drawing on 1970s feminist performance and contemporary embodied research-creation methodologies. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Concordia University (2019), where her thesis, Kinesthetic Knowledge and Corporal Agency, received an “excellent” ranking in the oral defense. Her master’s thesis, Feminist Video Art in the 70s in Spain, won the 1st Prize in Gender and Research from Jaume I University in 2013. 

She has served as Principal Investigator on several research, knowledge mobilization, and public scholarship initiatives 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 leadership in these projects demonstrates a sustained commitment to connecting academic research with broader communities and to advancing feminist and publicly engaged scholarship. 

Her research and media work have appeared in publications including Journal Feral Feminisms, Institute for Research on Women (Rutgers University), McGraw Hill Editorial, Arte y Políticas de Identidad, Humanities and Entropy (MDPI, Switzerland), Journal of Embodied Research (University of Huddersfield, UK), Asparkia Investigació Feminista, and Feminism and Psychology.  

Her pedagogical approach has been recognized with the 2024 Teaching Excellence Award at McGill University. She has been appointed to co-supervise doctoral theses in the PhD program in Art Studies and Practices - Doctorat en études et pratiques des arts (DÉPA) at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). 

Her research interests include kinesthesia, movement, kinesthetic empathy, corporeal processes of consciousness, perception, corporeal agency, feminist pedagogies, and embodied research-creation methodologies. Her working languages are Spanish (mother tongue), English, and French.