We are proud to launch the first Youth Dance Platform as part of Dance Festival Malta 2023. We invite the very best of young local dance talent to explore the professional performing arts in a supportive, inclusive, and non-competitive setting. The platform aims to provide opportunities to broaden experience and develop networks between educators, dancers, choreographers, and organisations. DFM encourages interested participants to apply to present their work.

Dr Paula Guzzanti

 Dr Paula Guzzanti is a dance artist and scholar, Tai Chi practitioner, and tango dancer and teacher. She started her dance training in Buenos Aires (Argentina), and later in Ireland where she completed her practice-based PhD in Dance Improvisation and Collaborative performance making in Queen’s University Belfast. She now resides in Malta where she is the Head of the Dance Studies Department of the University of Malta. She specialises in artistic and embodied research practices. In her research practice she works at the intersections of critical improvisation studies, collaborative performance-making, and affect theory, applied to socially engaged projects.  In 2019, Paula won the Higginson Leadership Award of the year to facilitate a dance and well-being project for Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica, which is documented in her award-winning Screendance film 'The Broken Body' (2021). Paula is currently working on a collaborative artistic research project investigating the role of the sensorial body in urban sustainable development in Malta, using somatic and new digital media technologies.