Sara Castelo Branco

Sara Castelo Branco is a curator, critic and researcher, based in Portugal, working on the intersections of art and the moving image. She holds a PhD in ‘Arts and Sciences of Art’ and ‘Communication Sciences’ at the Université Paris 1— Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris) and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Lisbon), as a grantee from FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology. Her areas of interest are experimental and artists’ cinemas, film and media theory, eco-media, visual politics, energetic politics, mythology and trans-temporality, and contemporary art. Currently, she is a collaborator researcher at the CIC.Digital - Centre for Research in Communication, Information and Digital Culture (FCSH-UNL), and an integrated researcher at CITAR – Center for Science and Technology of the Arts (Escola das Artes da Universidade Católica Portuguesa), where she is part of editorial board from The Science and Technology of the Arts Collection (CITAR UCP Press). In 2025, she was the recipient of the Javier & Marta Villavecchia Fellowship from the Haas Library / Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). In 2014, she concluded a master's degree in ‘Art Studies - Art Theory and Criticism’ at the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto, and in 2012 a degree in ‘Communication and Cultural Sciences’ at the Universidade Lusófona do Porto. She organized the symposiums 'Solarity Prospects' (with Claudia Peppel) at ICI Berlin/Bard College (Berlin, Germany) in 2023 and 'Back of My Hand' at Carpintarias de São Lázaro (Lisbon, Portugal) in 2022. Her practice has been developing from the close articulation between academic research, writing, and the curatorship of exhibitions and experimental film screenings. She has curated art exhibitions, public programs and screenings of artists’ films and experimental cinema in institutions such as Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna, Austria, 2025), La Caldera (Barcelona, Spain, 2025), Centro de Arte Oliva (São João da Madeira, Portugal, 2025), Culturgest/Museu do Caramulo (Caramulo, Portugal, 2025), ICI Berlin/Bard College (Berlin, Germany, 2023), ACUD Galerie (Berlin, Germany, 2023), Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst (Berlin, Germany, 2019-2024), CRIPTA 747 (Turin, Italy, 2021), Brotéria (Lisbon, Portugal, 2024), CSL (Lisbon, Portugal, 2022), Galerias Municipais de Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal, 2020), and Galeria Zé dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal, 2021). She was selected to do artistic research residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France, 2023) and at CRIPTA 747 (Turin, Italy, 2021). She regularly contributes with book chapters, articles and essays to monographs, art magazines and catalogues (Mousse, Archive Books, Galerias Municipais de Lisboa, Contemporânea, ATLAS Projectos, among others).