Coffee-chat – Sensitive leadership: How to implement a caring approach to managing teams with Andrea Peña

Any artist who hires a team for an arts project must assume HR responsibilities. However, there are few supports available in the cultural community for this vital and complex aspect of arts management. “Caring management” is a sensitive approach to personnel management that draws on values, emotional intelligence and a shared commitment to carry out the project together.

Choreographer Andrea Peña will lead a discussion of this type of human-centric management and talk about how she went about introducing it in her own practice.

Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Andrea Peña is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative practice transverses the fields of choreography, design and curation. Her works are focused on the creation of critical, alternative, performative and design based universes that question the individual within society. Artistic Director of Andrea Peña & Artists (AP&A), the company is recognized with numerous awards and commissions, for their conceptual, visceral and highly rigorous creations, recently including the 2018-19 Banff Arts Center’s Clifford E. Lee Canadian Choreography award and the 2018 Hong Kong International Choreography award for best choreography. AP&A’s works have been presented in Tokyo, India, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Panama, Greece and locally.

Andrea’s works are recognized for the creation of critical, alternative and spatial universes that rupture our notions of a sensible humanity. Interested in the depth of human individuality that breaches from a personal disposition as a bi-cultural artist, Peña’s approach is known for its difficult choreography as a highly intricate, vulnerable and somatic raw physicality that engages in deep encounters between the physical body and a highly conceptual research approach. Political yet abstract creations which transform conceptual research into theatrical larger ensemble

With a Masters in Design her work borrows from speculative design practices that reflect on the futuring of human identity– focusing on the gestural dialogues of movement within the everyday inhibition of the body in space, time and materiality.