Raquel Lima is a poet and transdisciplinary artist based between Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe. She published Ingenuidade Inocência Ignorância and has been organising art education workshops, with emphasis on Poetry, Race and Gender: towards an intersectional poetic writing, held in Estonia, Brazil, and Portugal. She co-founded the cultural association Pantalassa, Portugal SLAM – International Poetry and Performance Festival, the Antiracist Nucleus of Coimbra, Yanda Panafrikanu and UNA – União Negra das Artes (Black Union for the Arts). She has a degree in Artistic Studies – Performing Arts from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon (2008) and is a PhD candidate in Post-Colonial Studies at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Her research focuses on orature, slavery and Afro- diasporic movements, and she co-organized the Conference Afro Europeans: Black In/Visibilities Contested (2019). She has presented her academic work at various international conferences, most notably the Conference Authoring Human Rights in West Africa and beyond: Expressions of slaveries in Literature (texts) and the Arts (visuals) at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana (2023), and the Conference Decolonial Remains: Scrutinizing African Studies in Africa and the Unfinished Business of Decolonization at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (2022). In 2022, she was invited to the Venice Biennale as a speaker at the event Loophole of Retreat, invited as keynote speaker to the opening session of the World Congress of Women in Mozambique, and invited to the event Literature Talk: Poets from Black Europe at BOZAR in Belgium. Her work is at the crossroads between art, activism, and academia.
