Joana Craveiro is a playwright, director, actress, teacher and anthropologist. She is artistic director at Teatro Vestido, where she has written and directed more than 40 works. She is coordinator of the Theatre Degree at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha, where she fosters a creative and combative teaching approach that contributes to the creation of a world free from totalitarianism, xenophobia, misogyny and structural racism. She holds a PhD from Roehampton University, London, with a thesis on transmitting the political memory of the Portuguese Revolution 1974-75 and the Dictatorship 1926-74 through performance and theatre. Her research and oral history projects have been presented as performance lectures at national and international conferences since 2012. She has a Masters in Theatre Directing from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She has a degree in Anthropology from the NOVA University of Lisbon’s School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH) and graduated from the Actor Training Course at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. Her creative methods draw heavily on ethnographic practices and oral history. From 2011, Joana Craveiro began to consistently use oral history as the primary methodology of her research and creative work, having studied this discipline in courses taught by the Oral History Society, at the British Library, as well as in several workshops, masterclasses, conferences and courses with Alessandro Portelli, Martha Norkunas, Paula Godinho, Miguel Cardina, Rui Bebiano, and Indira Chowdhury, among others. She contributed to the work Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain (ed. Rina Benmayor et.al.), which received the Oral History Association (OHA) award in 2016. Joana Craveiro is also an associate researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA University of Lisbon (IHC/Nova). She furthered her collaborative work with Goat Island and Every House has a Door, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2008 and 2009. She learned about devising – which was something she already did without naming it such – with Alexander Kelly, of Third Angel, as part of the Gulbenkian Programme for Creativity and Artistic Creation. It was also there that she consolidated her autobiographical work.

In 2019, Joana Craveiro was nominated for the SPA Award/ Best Performed Portuguese Text for Elas também estiveram lá. In 2019, she published Margem, a text she wrote for Victor Hugo Pontes’ play of the same name (SPA Award/ Best Choreography, 2018). The play Um Museu Vivo de Memórias Pequenas e Esquecidas, considered a landmark contemporary Portuguese work, received the Audience Award at the Almada Theatre Festival in 2015, and was nominated by SPA for the Best Show award in the same year. This work is now studied by scholars for master’s and doctoral theses as a fundamental work for understanding a post-memory perspective of the Portuguese dictatorship and revolution and the ways in which that memory is transmitted. Joana Craveiro is a member of the network of European playwrights, Fabula Mundi. In 2021, Joana Craveiro directed her first film Elas também estiveram lá, Panel’s Special Prize, Festival Olhares do Mediterrâneo, 2021.

In 2002, she received a Fulbright scholarship to the USA, where she conducted research at the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, at Rutgers University, working directly with Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, an author whose works include Yellow Peril!

Teatro do Vestido is a theatre collective founded in 2001 and whose first play, Tua, premièred at Galeria Zé dos Bois. Its primary working methodologies are the creation of original dramatic texts, the search for alternative performance settings, the observation of reality, ethnographic research, and oral history. The company constantly seeks new ways of making autobiographical, political, engaged and poetic theatre, by means of collaborative processes, with Joana Craveiro as artistic director. The ethical, social and pedagogical dimensions have been part of the company since its formation in 2001, and have been expressed in the multiple projects developed throughout its 20 years of activity. The company has always worked on the theme of memory and its relationship with society and individual lives, making its theatre a mixture of autobiography and profound reflection on the surrounding reality. The company has been attempting to redefine the way a political and documentary theatre functions today. The poetics of cities, vacant spaces, spaces of passage in transformation; the attentive and engaged observation of everyday life; fieldwork, the collection of memories and life stories; historical memory, and the creation of various communities with the passage of the company – all these aspects are the methodological and artistic hallmark of Teatro do Vestido’s work. Recognising this, in 2012 the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics described Teatro do Vestido as being engaged in “an activity open to all art forms, attentive to all citizens and curious about everything that goes on in the world where people live”.