Denise Ferreira Da Silva

University of British Columbia

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher and artist. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Ferreira Da Silva has published several books in English and Portuguese, most recently “Unpayable Debt” with Sternberg Press. Denises work offers a theory of race (Towards a Global Idea of Race, 2007) that goes through a deconstruction of Enlightenment philosophy and identifies the separation between self determined subjects and affectable others as a main axis for the reproduction of racial violence. Her artistic practice includes three movies she made with Arjuna Neumann Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018) and Sooth Breath/ Corpus Infinitum (2020) and a lasting collaboration with Valentina Desideri with whom she gives workshops on practices and orders of sensing in formats like the Sensing Salon and Political Therapy.