
BIOGRAPHY
SIMONE LINHARES FERRO
A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Simone Ferro is a multi-disciplinary choreographer, educator, and researcher. Beginning her professional career as soloist with dance companies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Geneva, Switzerland, she went to complete her graduate work in dance at the University of Iowa. A Professor Emerita of Dance, she joined the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2001 where she served as M.F.A. program director and as department chair until her departure in 2022.
She is currently in her second term as the president of the Wisconsin Dance Council and has been on the board of the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD).
COLLABORATIONS
Simone has collaborated extensively with local dance, theater, and opera companies, including the Milwaukee Ballet, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, the Florentine Opera, the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, the Milwaukee Opera Theater, Danceworks MKE, Wild Space Dance Company, and Theatre Gigante. She is a strong advocate for the local and regional artistic communities where she collaborates with a variety of multi-disciplinary performance and visual artists, and scholars. Her work often deals with social and environmental justice, engaging her dancers both artistically and pedagogically as citizen artists.
RESEARCH
For the past 15 years, she has travelled to Brazil with her husband and research partner, Meredith W. Watts, to research and document traditional popular and folk cultures and oral histories of culture leaders and producers in Maranhão. Jointly they pioneered a repository of the Folk Festival Bumba-meu-boi as practiced in Maranhão. Simone has recently completed a manuscript she is jointly writing with her husband on the Leadership of Women in the Popular Culture of Maranhão.
PODCAST
In 2022, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in support of her extensive research in Brazil’s Northeastern state of Maranhão. The culmination of this project is a series of podcasts titled: A Liderança Feminina na Cultura Popular Maranhense: História, Memória e Legado (Feminine Leadership in the Popular Culture of Maranhão: History, Memory and Legacy)
MILWAUKEE THROUGH EMBODIED RESEARCH
Simone’s project Milwaukee Through Embodied Research has engaged more than fifteen undergraduate research students between 2016-2022. The project addresses social and environmental justice and community resilience through oral histories in the urban communities of Sherman Park and Washington Park in Milwaukee. The project includes a variety of community activities including site-specific interventions in foreclosure homes, and performances in private homes, in porches and living rooms, parks, alleys, restaurants and public spaces.
EDUCATION, TRAINING & CERTIFICATIONS
Master of Fine Arts in Dance
University of Iowa (2000)
Professor Emerita of Dance
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
(2001-2022)
Laban Certified Movement Analyst Columbia College of Chicago (2015)
Certified Myofascial Trainer (2022)
AWARDS
UWM Graduate School
Research Grant
Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award
Research Growth
Initiative (RGI) Grant
Choreographic Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board
University of Iowa
Alumni Fellowship, 2013
The first woman in dance to receive this award
Career Recognition Award
Wisconsin Dance Council
Fellowship
UWM’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Fulbright Fellowship, 2022
In support of extensive research in Brazil’s Northeastern state of Maranhão