ABOUT US
Bringing people together across
arts and cultures
Curiosa creates spaces for interaction, sharing, and learning between communities, artists, and travelers, through creative collaboration.
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We aim to encourage personal and artistic growth through questioning, exploration, and exchange. We’re curious about how culture and history inform our identities and artistic practices, and believe that by sharing and creating together, we can expand both our creative and our personal horizons.
We create immersive art-travel experiences, artists residencies, educational music and arts camps, creative workshops, community engaged projects, and more.
Kate Smith, Founder
Multi-genre singer, composer and workshop leader (USA)
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Kate is a captivating singer and performer, a versatile improviser, a producer and an entrepreneur, a leader and collaborator — a traveler between cultures and art forms. At the heart of her practice is the search for connections between people and disciplines. That quest has taken her from filming documentaries in Chinese oil fields, to leading choirs for mental health, to performing street theatre in rural Croatia. It's also led her to found Curiosa, a new type of company that combines all of her passions - travel, music, arts, and community.
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Kate is passionate about creating music - and facilitating collective music-making - for voices and bodies in motion, ultimately breaking down divisions between mind-body-voice, self-other-nature. She is the creator of The Embodied Voice, a holistic practice that draws on a range of performance and somatic disciplines; through movement, mindfulness, voice and improvisation, her workshops seek to remind us of the joy of being alive, creative, and connected.
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Currently based in London, Kate manages a diverse practice that encompasses vocal teaching, workshop-leading, performance, research, and entrepreneurship. Kate earned her BA in Film and East Asian Studies at Columbia University, and studied Classical Voice at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she also completed her MMus and a Fellowship in Leadership. Prior to moving to the UK, she worked as a video producer and singer in Beijing, China, where she was known as “the singing madame of Beijing’s cabaret scene” (Global Times), in addition to being a bilingual Mandarin-English video producer for brands including Volkswagen and Ogilvy.
Filipe Sousa, Music Leader
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Pianist, composer, and workshop leader (Portugal)
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Filipe Sousa is a Portuguese pianist/composer and workshop leader based in the UK. He works with artists and communities of ranging age, ability and background. He founded Quest Ensemble and has been commissioned to create sound installations and to write for music ensembles, film and dance. Filipe regularly leads workshops and presents work in the UK and across the World.
Trained at the Lisbon Gregorian Institute, Hot Club Portugal, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, his work as a composer and performer is often concerned with motion and movement, driven by a strong sense of rhythm. His background is in classical and jazz piano, but his interest in the details and minutiae of sound has taken him into the realms of sound art, sound design for dance and theatre, composition, and performance. Filipe is interested in performance as experience and in generating immersive sound environments.
Beatriz M Barrio, Visual Arts Leader
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Photographer, teacher, and arts therapist (Spain)
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Beatriz M Barrio is a visual artist and art therapist based in Madrid, Spain. She is interested in the therapeutic qualities of art making and believes in the healing power of creativity. She combines her teaching activity as coordinator of the International Contemporary Photography Master Program at EFTI School of Photography in Madrid, with her practice as an Art therapist and the organization of creativity workshops.
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She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Complutense University of Madrid (1996), and has received fellowships to complete her studies at Leeds Metropolitan University (1995) and at the School of Fine Arts in Athens (2000). She was also granted “La Caixa Felloship” to fulfill a Master of Fine Arts at New York University (2002). She has participated in group shows in United States, Greece, and Spain. She is a Gestalt Therapist, a Río Abierto Corporal and Transpersonal Therapist and collaborates as a professor at different Art Therapy Schools in Madrid.
Henrique Apolinario, Logistics
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Actor, musician, and performance maker (Portugal)
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Henrique Apolinário is a Portuguese experimental creator. He focuses on music, acting and many overlapping subjects such as circuit-bending, automatic writing and micology. He studied violin since he was 6 years of age and graduated in acting in ESMAE, Porto on 2015.
Since 2016 he has been developing workshops for kids, mixing the logics of sound, theatre and painting. Living in Porto, he founded the collective Fenda, a group of people engaged in creating performance, music and multimedia events. Recently he has premiered his first album with Mariya Nesvyetaylo and Rodrigo Malvar, included in the project Cavalo na Caixa. Right now he's working on sound design and theatre projects.
Rodrigo Viterbo, Logistics
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Didgeridoo musician, and community artist (Portugal)
https://about.me/rodrigoviterbo
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Rodrigo Viterbo is a Portuguese didgeridoo musician, maker and teacher since 2001, a Community Artist since 2013 and a Sound Artist since 2016. His work with sound and music revolves around the themes of Making and Participation. If Making is Connecting, how can we Make together, to Connect with each other? Inspired by Musicking (as described by Christopher Small) he aspires to work each day to search for and create spaces where people come together to make music and sound. The experience of togetherness amplifies our reflection on participation on the wider society.
Rodrigo has been involved in musicking with people of all ages and conditions, be it in an hospital, or in care homes in partnership with members of the London Symphony Orchestra, in schools working with teenagers setting up didgeridoo ensembles, and in many other musicking experiences.
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Check out his musical project Onda de Pressão, a sonic story told by a didgeridoo and a friend!
