MARÍA REGINA FIRMINO-CASTILLO, Ph.D. (She/Her/Hers)
Assistant Professor

As an engaged scholar and artist, I focus on the transcorporeal body as a site of ontological production, destruction, and transformation, especially in the contexts of coloniality and its 21st century iterations. Most of my doctoral training is in cultural anthropology (University of New Mexico), and I hold a PhD in transdisciplinary studies (California Institute of Integral Studies), an epistemological approach that interrogates the taken-for-granted premises of disciplinary paradigms. I apply transdisciplinarity to the fields I work in—mainly (but not only) anthropology and dance and performance studies—to disrupt artificial compartmentalizations of knowledge that sustain systems of dominant power. To this end, my research is also informed by Black, Indigenous, and gender studies as an intersecting body of critical theory that works against colonial taxonomies of knowledge and being. My scholarly work exists in synergy with my artistic process, therefore I engage in performance and other practices as vehicles of onto-corporeal investigation to provoke anti-paradigmatic inquiry and cultivate relational knowledge.

My work is deeply informed by dialogical engagements with research and artistic collaborators rooted in communities of struggle in Guatemala, México, and the United States. I have worked with Ixil survivors of Guatemala’s genocidal counterinsurgency war (1960-1996) on art, performance, and oral history projects dedicated to repairing the physical and ontological destruction caused by the war and its violent aftermath. My published articles describe these projects as embodied forms of ontological regeneration in response to a genocidal campaign that sought to annihilate the Ixil as a people and destroy their relationality with the land. With a collective of Ixil knowledge-holders I co-authored Uma’l Iq’: Tiempo y Espacio Maya Ixil; published in 2014 by a Mayan press in Guatemala, the book documents Ixil ritual sites and the process behind the building of a monument commemorating the roles that calendar keepers and midwives had in Ixil survival during centuries of colonialism and the recent genocidal war. With Ixil artist, Tohil Fidel Brito, and Kaqchikel dancer and musician, Daniel Guarcax, I have co-written essays that articulate contestatory theories of movement vis-à-vis  colonial prohibitions of ritual and performance as well as the contemporary persecution of asylum seekers’ movements across colonial borders. Furthermore, I have published several essays in relation to the work of Be’ena’Za’a (Zapotec) artist and anthropologist Lukas Avendaño, whose performances, writings, and activism denounce state violence in México while critically interrogating the coloniality of binary gender and digital dualism. In other writing, I reflexively consider my participation in a performance collaboration that intended to forge intersectional camaraderie in the face of state violence to critically reflect on the failures, and potentials, of utopic performance experiments to break with the autopoietic perpetuation of coloniality and antiblackness as imbricated systems of domination.

My current book project, tentatively titled (Re)Placing the Three Stones, deploys the tools of dance, performance, and corporeality studies (namely, an analytic focus on the body) to reveal the mechanisms through which the ontological premises undergirding necropower in 20th and 21st century Guatemala and Southern México are corpo-realized through choreographies of state terror. At the same time, (Re)Placing the Three Stones engages with artists and cultural workers in the region whose work and processes attempt to confront necropower and its emergent forms. Centering their work and lived experience as critical theory, (Re)Placing the Three Stones dialogically articulates the onto-corporeal politics forwarded by their practices—which include activations of paradox, crepuscularity, and the ouroboric—as alternatives to the taxonomic frameworks imposed through colonial violence. Through these means, the book contributes to the critical study of genocide and ontological annihilation as they become normalized in 21st century articulations of necropolitics, while exploring the potentials of an onto-corporeal politics that departs from the self-replicating frameworks of a long-standing coloniality.

As a faculty member in UCR’s Department of Dance, I teach graduate seminars and undergraduate courses that center transdisciplinary and anticolonial approaches to the critical study of bodies, their entanglements with environments and systems of power, and their movements across space and time. These courses often combine research and writing with practice-based methodologies. As a mentor, I serve on MFA and PhD committees in Experimental Choreography and Critical Dance Studies, respectively; I have also mentored doctoral students in anthropology, Hispanic studies, and ethnomusicology at UCR and in other disciplines at outside institutions. Additionally, I participate in the graduate Designated Emphasis in Corporeality and Embodiment Studies and the undergraduate Designated Emphasis in Medical Humanities. I am also an invited faculty collaborator of the Health Humanities and Disability Justice Lab at UC Riverside and a member of the intercampus UCHRI faculty working group, Fostering Collective Care and Repair: Critical Central American Studies Research and Pedagogical Praxis as Resistance.

I have received support for my studies from the National Science Foundation (anthropology, University of New Mexico), and my research has been funded by the University of California Regents Fellowship, the Mellon Humanities Quarterly Fellowship at UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

PUBLICATIONS

Books:

• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina. (Re)Placing the Three Stones, [in preparation].
• Firmino-Castillo, María and Tohil Brito Bernal, Lalo Velasco Ceto, Xhas Matom. Uma’l Iq’: Tiempo y Espacio Maya’ Ixil, Cholsamaj Press, 2014.

Articles and Book Chapters:

• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina with performative texts by Lukas Avendaño and Almah LaVon Rice, and in conversation with taisha paggett. “Through the Obsidian Mirror: Onto-Corporeal Experimentations at Twilight,” Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness, edited by Michaeline A. Crichlow and Patricia Northover, Routledge Press, [forthcoming 2025].
• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina. “‘Dancing the Pluriverse’ Redux: a reflexive critique of praxis split from poiesis,” Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis. Volume 1: Dance & Corporeality, edited by Anurima Banerji, Jasmine Johnson, and Royona Mitra, Oxford University Press, [forthcoming 2025].
• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina. “Ouroboros, Lemniscate, The Cloud, and Earth: Lukas Avendaño and Muxx Project’s Performances of Paradox against Gender, Digital, and Other Necropolitical Binaries,” edited by Jorge Póveda and Rory Fuller, Documenta Journal, Ghent University. [forthcoming 2024].
• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina. “Les desaparecides de Xibalbá: remembranzas corporales del Xibalbay,” Terremoto: Edición 24 “Cabeza de Tierra,” edited by Duen Sacchi, 2023.
• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina; Guarcax, Daniel; Tohil Fidel Brito. “Destellos entre mundos y cuerpos: de la historiografía colonial en Mesoamérica a una historiología aplicada anticolonial, especulativa, y pluriversal,” Revista Brasileira de Estudos em Dança 1 (1): 318-352, 2022.
• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina. “The Refusal to be Disappeared: Lukas Avendaño’s Xibalbay,” Howlround Theatre Commons, 28 October, 2021.
• Firmino-Castillo, María Regina. “RUXIMIK QAK’U’X: Inextricable Relationalities in Mayan Performance Practice, a Dialogical Co-Theorization with Daniel Fernando Guarcax González and Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies. Volume XL “Decolonizing Dance Discourses” edited by Anurima Banerji and Royona Mitra: 31-35, 2020.
• Firmino Castillo, María Regina; Guarcax González, Daniel Fernando and Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal.. “Beyond the Border: Embodied Mesoamerican Transmotions,” Movement Research Performance Journal: (Special Issue #52/53) Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest edited by Rosy Simas and Ahimsa Timotéo Bodhran, 2019.
• Firmino Castillo, María Regina; Guarcax González, Daniel Fernando; and Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal. “Ruximik Qak’u’x: Inescapable Relationalities in Grupo Sotz’il’s Performance Practice,” Imaginations: Revue d’études interculturelles de l’image. Issue on Critical Relationality: Indigenous and Queer Belonging Beyond Settler Sex & Nature, edited by Kimberly Tallbear and Angela Willey, 2019.
• Firmino Castillo, María Regina. “WHAT MA LACH’S BONES TELL US: Performances of Relational Materiality in Response to Genocide,” Transmotion: Special Issue on Genocide, edited by Melissa Michal Slocum. Vol. 4.2, 2018.
• Firmino Castillo, María Regina.“Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis,” Dance Research Journal: Special Issue on Indigenous Dance Now, edited by Jacqueline Shea Murphy. 48(1):55-73, 2016.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS / PERFORMANCES / SCREENINGS

• “High sea, high c Listens for the ocean” / gathering fire, joining twilights, freeing stones, uncovering sky, hearing earth… Experiment in crepuscular corpo/poiesis, in collaboration with Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal. togetherfire. Curated by taisha paggett and meital yadav; produced by homeLA. October 28, 2023.
• La Imagen Quema: Perspectivas del videoarte en Guatemala. Exhibition of “Ave Fenix” in collaboration with Sandra Monterroso and Claudia Méndez. Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, Ciudad de Guatemala. May 14 – August 13, 2022.
• COSMOGRAMA / REMEMBRANZAS DEL IXKIN: Prototipo Experimental Interdimensional: in collaboration with Tohil / Fidel Eduardo Brito Bernal, Escuela de Muralismo y Arquitectura Vernácula de Oaxaca; Oaxaca, Mexico, January 14, 2022.
• 13 Akb’al: twilighting time, in collaboration with Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal, taisha paggett, and Samuel Briseño and the participation of Lukas Avendaño, P. Don’Té Cuauhtemoc, Mike Madrigal, Fabiola Ochoa Torralba, .turay pastel, Estrellx Supernova (randy reyes), Almah LaVon Rice, Amelia Uzategui Bonilla, and Talavai Denipah-Cook. Curated by Estrellx Supernova (randy reyes) as part of PLATAFORMA. Online & Riverside, CA. October 3, 2020.
• Ixkin: Word, Movement, and Relational Worlds. Interactive performance lecture, with Tohil Fidel Brito. Indigenous Writers and their Critics: International Symposium, organized by Gloria Chacón. University of California, San Diego. February 25, 2020.
• Ixkin: Kaxb’ichil, Xamal, Ootzaqib’al / ThreeStones: Wound, Fire, Knowledge, Interactive performance, with Tohil Fidel Brito and Amaru Márquez Ambía. Knowledge of Wounds, curated by S.J Norman and Joseph M. Pierce. Performance Space New York. January 11, 2020.
• B’eluval Aama (Ajmaq), Santa Fe Art Institute, part of SeedBroadcast’s |UN|silo|ED| Seeds In collaboration with Tohil / Fidel Brito Bernal. May 16, 2015.
• Entre un ixil y otro, in collaboration with Tohil / Fidel Brito Bernal. Translocaciones: Geografías Suaves, Yoochel Kaaj. Month-long Site-specific community-based performance project. Ixil, Yucatán, México. 2014. https://vimeo.com/121905501
• Screening of la-del-fuego-en-el-horizonte, in collaboration with Behiquealto/Rafael Domenech, Encuentro VII, Ciudadanías en Escena, Cultural Rights in the Americas. New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics; Bogotá, Colombia. 2009.