As a partner of the Salavisa European Dance Award, we share with great pride the shortlist for 2026. Lukas Avendaño (Mexico) — whom we presented at our Próximamente Festival in 2024 — is shortlisted alongside Chiara Bersani (Italy), Dan Daw (Australia), Jefta van Dinther (The Netherlands/Sweden), and Mamela Nyamza (South Africa).
They are in contention for the prestigious dance award worth €150,000, which will be presented in November in Lisbon.
The award is one of the largest dance prizes in the world and was initiated by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, in collaboration with leading European dance institutions: Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), KVS (Brussels), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen), Maison de la Danse / Biennale de la Danse (France), Joint Adventures (Munich), Sadler’s Wells (United Kingdom), Fabbrica Europa (Florence), and Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona). During the first edition, in 2024, the award was presented to Dorothée Munyaneza and Idio Chichava.
What makes this award distinctive is its mission. The Salavisa European Dance Award does not aim to crown a career, but to provide fundamental support to a promising artist at a crucial moment. The award is decided by an independent jury, which in 2026 consists of choreographer La Ribot (Spain/Switzerland), researcher Gurur Ertem (Turkey/Germany), and curator River Lin (Taiwan/France).
Below, we introduce the shortlisted artists:
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. She was one of the co-founders of Al.Di.Qua.Artists. Winner of several awards, she is co-curator of 2025/2026 season at Spazio Kor (Asti, Italy) and guest curator of the 2025 edition of the Bastards international performing arts festival (Trondheim, Norway). She is an associate artist of Triennale Milano Teatro 2025-2027.
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. Throughout his career, he has worked with several international choreographers and companies. He is an Associate Artist of Sadlers Wells, London. Curator and co-curator of several festivals, he is the founder of Dan Daw Creative Projects, UK-based company disabled led company, leading the way in creating accessible international touring work that blurs the lines between theatre, dance and activism, alongside creating systemic change in institutions and the sector for d/Deaf and disabled artists and audiences through long-term partnerships and residencies.
Dan Daw has been recognised as an artist whose contribution to contemporary performance is transforming the field both structurally and aesthetically. His practice incorporates a rare combination of conceptual acuity, emotional intelligence and political necessity, expanding what representation, autonomy and intimacy can mean on stage. His artistic practice is inseparable from his activism: both insist on access, authorship, complexity, and dignity.
jefta van dinther
Choreographer, dancer and teacher. Central in his work is the question of what it means to be human, examined through its relation to society, community and environment but also to other forms of life. Equally central in his current work is a deepening commitment to accessibility and diversity within the field of contemporary dance. He teaches choreography internationally at various centers and educational programmes. He served as a Senior Lecturer and Artistic Director in the MA programme in Choreography at Uniarts Stockholm. Since 2024, Van Dinther has been a member of the Advisory Board of HZT, Berlin, where he has been running the workspace DIORAMA since 2022.
Jefta van Dinther is considered 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. Having trained in Dance and Anthropology, his practice fuses dance, ritual, ethnography, and activism. His work draws 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.
His work emerges in a liminal space where dance becomes a technology of memory, survival (survivance) and collective imagination, with the potential to reshape how global contemporary dance understands ritual, identity and activism – offering new methodologies, imaginaries and possibilities for the future of the field.
Mamela Nyamza
Dancer, teacher, choreographer, and activist. Rejected by her classical Ballet Teachers because of her natural body structure, she was inevitably drawn to the politics of the body. She graduated from the Tshwane University of Technology with a National Diploma in Ballet, and continued her training at the Alvin Ailey International School for Dance in New York. Winner of several awards, she created a non-profit company MAMELAS ARTISTIC MOVEMENT, which provides a creative home for those unemployed dance artists who have been marginalised due to body politics.
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.