Ciane Fernandes is a tenured professor in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil and an associate researcher at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS), New York. She received a Ph.D. in art and humanities for performing artists from New York University (1995) and a certificate of movement analysis from LIMS (1994).
In The United States, she danced with the Synergic Theater, Nancy Zendora Dance Company, Words & Limbs Performance Group, and in several independent productions, also studying with various choreographers, as postmodern pioneer Douglas Dunn. In Italy, she choreographed and danced at the interactive productions of the New York University New Music Ensemble, together with Douglas Dunn.
She has performed many times in various Brazilian capitals, either in festivals (e.g. International Theater Festival 2000 - Belo Horizonte), conferences (e.g. Laban Conference 2002 - Rio de Janeiro), or at cultural events supported by the Goethe Institute (Salvador, Porto Alegre and Curitiba), among others. She is the director of the AFFECTUS Dance Theater Group at the Federal University of Bahia, which in 2000 received the Brazilian ANDES-SN National Prize for Art at Universities, Dance Category. She is the author of Pina Bausch and The Wuppertal Dance Theater: The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation (New York: Peter Lang, 2001 and 2002 - second printing) and The Moving Body: The Laban/Bartenieff System in Performing Arts Education and Research (portuguese edition: São Paulo: Annablume, 2002; 300pgs.; soon, in english edition, too). She has been awarded with several scholarships and prizes, including a 2003 Virtuoso Grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture to further develop her latest project: a comparative study between contemporary dance theater and the classical Indian dance style of Bharatanatyam at the Rajyashree Ramesh Academy for Performing Arts, Berlin (... see: dance theater & ÜBERGANG).