Daniel Plá

Dr. Daniel R. Plá is associate professor at the Performing Arts department in the “Universidade Federal de Santa Maria” (UFSM, BR), where he also served as head of department for 10 years. He has been studying the relation between actor’s training and Buddhist meditation since 2003 and in 2012 finished his PhD on Performing Arts at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP, BR) with the thesis “How to Ride the wind: Buddhist meditation Contributions to the dialog on actor’s training”. At UFSM he leads a research group on Performance art, training and mindfulness. He was part of Mindfulness and Performance Project (MaP) linked to the Centre for Psychophysical Performance Research from the University of Huddersfield (UK), and is part of the editors team of Performance and Mindfulness Journal. He spent the year 2015-16 in Huddersfield researching creative practices in actor’s pedagogical processes based on psychophysical training and meditation here funded by CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Pessoal de Nível Superior, BR). In Brazil he coordinated the project Meditation and contemplative practices in Higher Education from 2019 to 2022, investigating creative and pedagogical approaches for actor's training in Higher Education Institutions. In 2016 and 2021 he was the coordinator of the 1st and 2nd Performing Arts and Contemplative practices Seminar, in Rio de Janeiro and Santa Maria, and was part of the organization team for the Mindfulness and Performance symposium (UK, 2016). He is engaged in the WISE Project- linked to the Wellbeing Project,  Contemplative Pedagogy Network and Community Arts Network. His research interests are psychophysical training and meditation, Theatre learning, Contemplative and transformative pedagogy, contemplative practices, mindfulness and creative processes, practice as research.
Supervisors: Deborah Middleton, Sara Pereira Lopes, Cassiano Sydow Quilici, Inaicyra Falcão dos Santos, and Gisela Reis Biancalana