Based in New York, Sofia has performed at many of the city's prime venues, including PS1, WOW Cafe Theater, Leslie/Lohman Gallery, the SITE Bushwick arts festival, and more recently Performa 09 as part of the sculpture installation Mother, Earth, Sister, Moon. With performance art project Cumul, a collaboration with artist Gillian Sneed, she performs "The Embrace," an eco-art piece enacted in diverse environments over the course of several years, eventually to culminate in a film installation. The bulletin "Shiner: performance machine" will also be launched in 2010.

In theory, Sofia's fascinations lie with interdisciplinary criticism and with alternative methods of analysis. Research areas/ interests include science studies, philosophy of language, pornography and sex genres, film theory, criminology and legal discourse, material culture, theories of sexuality, comparative mysticism, dance and performance art.

At the International Federation for Theater Research conference in July 2009, Sofia presented "Playing Dirty: The State Against The Drag" on the legal complexities and aesthetic anxieties at the core of the censorship case against Mae West’s play The Drag that led to the screen siren's arrest in 1927. This year she will be participating as part of the Feminist Research Working Group.

Sofia is currently writing on the encounter with the historical other in the plays of Hélène Cixous for her master's thesis, provisionally titled "An Economy of Magic: subjects of history in the primal scenes of Hélène Cixous."

Moonlighting as an event producer, Sofia has organized various shows and parties, including the raucous Porn Brunch! and more recently "Judged for Sex," a sold-out collective art show at Hi Christina. Currently, she is developing with Prof. Lidia Santos the event Texto Clarice in celebration of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to be held at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Word-wise, Sofia continues to perform and write material for the always on the verge of completion poetry collection Alpha Speech and to edit the volume that will slowly but surely take its shape as Every Breath: chronicles in performance.

                                                                                                                                        To find out more about Cumul please go to

                                                                                                                                                                                www.cumul.org

Born in 1978 in Portugal, Sofia Varino's background is in communication and theater. As one of two Holy Whores in London circa 2003, Sofia started a career in performance art that took her across the edges of burlesque and clowning and involved many lessons in the sweet tenderness of shared humiliation. With The Hungry Hearts band, Sofia has toured internationally, from London and Japan to the Storås rock festival in Norway and her grandmother’s tiny forgotten village in Portugal. Her work on camera is featured in a number of shorts that have been screened widely, including Cineffable in Paris, MIX NYC, Anthology Film Archives, and more recently the Berlin Porn Film Festival.

Sofia has a B.A. (Hons) in Writing and Publishing from Middlesex University in London specializing in broadcasting and media studies. During 2001, Sofia attended Edith Cowan University's writing program in Perth, Australia, where in addition to writing a series of non-fiction articles for an ethnology project on the practice of identity, she was introduced to bellydancing and the wonders of the desert cockroach. She is currently completing her MA in Theater at CUNY with a focus on performance art and political theater.