Salavisa European Dance Award 2026

On the initiative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, nine European cultural institutions, including Tanzquartier Wien, Dansehallerne (Denmark), Fondazione Fabbrica Europa per le arti contemporanee ETS (Italy), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal), Joint Adventures (Germany), KVS (Belgium), Maison de la Danse/Biennale de la Danse (France), Mercat de les Flors (Spain), and Sadler’s Wells (United Kingdom), award the SEDA – Salavisa European Dance Award, worth €150,000, every two years.

From a list of 27 candidates, the nomination committee, comprising representatives from the individual partner institutions, has selected five finalists. The nominees are: Chiara Bersani (Italy), Dan Daw (Australia), Jefta van Dinther (Netherlands/Sweden), Lukas Avendaño (Mexico), and Mamela Nyamza (South Africa). The winner will be selected by a three-member international jury and announced on 17 November 2026, at an award ceremony at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

The nominees

Chiara Bersani
Performing artist, activist and choreographer. She works on the accessibility of disabled artists in the performing arts scene, exploring the politics of the body and how the images we create interact with society’s narratives. Chiara Bersani's choreographic practice is defined by radical precision, conceptual depth and political urgency. Her work proposes a profound reformulation of the relationship between body, time, vision and power, challenging the dominant aesthetics of virtuosity, speed and productivity, proposing instead a practice anchored in duration, attention and radical presence.

Dan Daw
Artist and producer. He began working as a performer with Restless Dance Theatre (AUS) in 2002. He is the founder of Dan Daw Creative Projects, a UK-based, disabled-led company that leads the way in creating accessible international touring work that blurs the lines between theatre, dance, and activism. Dan Daw has been recognised as an artist whose contribution to contemporary performance is transforming the field both structurally and aesthetically. His artistic practice is inseparable from his activism: both insist on access, authorship, complexity, and dignity.

Jefta van Dinther
Choreographer, dancer and teacher. Jefta van Dinther is widely regarded as one of the most visionary choreographers of his generation. His work addresses profound and universal questions – such as what it means to be human in relation to others, history and the world – and reveals how bodies are shaped by social, cultural and atmospheric forces. Presenting the human as simultaneously biological and relational, physical and psychological, he has developed a choreographic language in which the body is never alone. It moves within immersive constellations of light, sound, objects and materials that radically transform perception.

Lukas Avendaño
Performing artist, choreographer, anthropologist, and writer. His practice fuses dance, ritual, ethnography, and activism. His work emerges in a liminal space where dance becomes a technology of memory, survival (survivance), and collective imagination, drawing on muxeidad – the Zapotec social and gender system that unsettles the colonial male/female binary and that has existed since before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas –, to stage charged explorations of sexuality, indigeneity, and power. He has presented work widely in Mexico and abroad. As an activist, he addresses one of the most urgent crises in the Americas: the disappearance and murder of people, among whom his own brother.

Mamela Nyamza
Dancer, teacher, choreographer, and activist. Exploring a practice rooted in feminism, decolonial critique, autobiographical research and an unwavering commitment to social justice, Mamela Nyamsa has been reshaping the African and international performance landscapes, demonstrating how movement can act as a catalyst for cultural and institutional transformation. The deconstruction of the Western dance canon is central to her work: Nyamza exposes the historical exclusions inscribed in its structures and reclaims space for historically marginalized black, queer, and female bodies.

The jury consists of Ilgaz Gurur Ertem (sociologist, dancer, programmer, Türkiye), La Ribot (choreographer, dancer, Spain), and River Lin (artist, curator, Taiwan).

About SEDA
Created in 2023 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and other European cultural institutions to honour the legacy of Portuguese dancer, teacher and artistic director Jorge Salavisa (1939-2020), the Salavisa European Dance Award (SEDA) is awarded to artists from across the world who demonstrate talent or unique qualities worthy of international recognition.

This European dance award, worth €150,000, is granted every two years and aims to serve as an incentive for artists of artistic maturity who do not fall within a strict age category and are still little known on the European circuit due to their artistic discourse or their social and cultural background.