Cristina Candela
Flamenco Dancer, Choreographer & Interdisciplinary Artist
Cristina Candela is a Spanish flamenco dancer and choreographer whose artistry merges the depth of traditional flamenco with contemporary sensibility, improvisation, and interdisciplinary creation. Based between Barcelona and New York City, she is known for her expressive strength, musicality, and her unique ability to connect flamenco’s ancestral roots with today’s artistic languages.
Cristina currently hosts and performs at the Flamenco Jazz Jam at DROM (New York City), where she shares the stage with internationally renowned musicians such as Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Ricardo Sanchez (acclaimed Mexican guitarist, Jose Moreno, etc. She is also the director and dancer of the show Tablao at Teatro LATEA (NYC), bringing the raw intimacy of the Andalusian tablao to the New York stage. Her dance combines intensity, vulnerability, and freedom, exploring flamenco as both a traditional and experimental art form.
Over the years, she has performed as a soloist in prestigious tablaos and venues including Alegrías La Nacional (New York), Los Tarantos (Barcelona), Café Flamenco Zyriab (Madrid), and Tablao El Cortijo (Germany), among others.
She collaborates with Grammy Award–winning guitarist and producer Hernán Romero, and performed at international festivals such as the Ankara International Flamenco Festival, the Bozcaada Music Festival, and the Yehudi Menuhin Gstaad Festival (where she performed with violinist Volker Biesenbender).
Her flamenco journey is marked by constant exploration. In 2021, after an artistic residency at Miami Light Project, she premiered her first experimental work NANA, an intimate piece merging flamenco, performance art, and contemporary dance, later presented at Festival Seismes and Estados de Tránsito (Barcelona). In 2023–2024, she was a resident artist in Research and Artistic Experimentation at the Santa Mònica Arts Center (Barcelona), developing projects that investigate the body as ritual, archive, and resistance.
Cristina has also performed in large-scale productions such as the opera Turandot at the Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona, 2023) and collaborated with Juan Carlos Lérida in projects like Romería de Montjuïc and Mundos Paralelos as a part of Flamenco Lab at the Institut del Teatre (Barcelona).
As a creator and filmmaker, Cristina has directed and performed in a series of acclaimed dance films that have been selected for international festivals including the Miami Screendance Festival, Módena Dance Film Festival, and Seismes Festival (Barcelona) Her short films, such as Silencio, Bailes al vacío, Action Rituelle des Ancêtres, and NAAN, reflect her poetic approach to movement and her fascination with memory, identity, and transformation.
In addition to her work as a performer, Cristina is a published poet (La piel no es frontera, Talón de Aquiles Editorial, 2023) She ia a dedicated teacher with over 15 years of experience. She has taught flamenco and sevillanas in Spain and internationally, and continues to give workshops and masterclasses-most recently at the Dominican Republic “Siente el Flamenco” Festival (Santo Domingo, 2025).
Through her dance, Cristina Candela embodies a dialogue between tradition and innovation, body and silence, root and rebellion. Her art invites audiences into a world where flamenco becomes not just a form of expression, but a living act of creation.