iara Solano Arana (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 1985) is an artist and researcher with a BA in European Theatre Arts from Rose Bruford College (United Kingdom) and a Master’s in Performing Arts Practice and Visual Culture from the UCLM University with the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. She designs relational devices that cross disciplines and place the audience as the core or trigger of a stage, installation or audiovisual piece.

Since 2006 she has co-directed the international live art and experimental theatre company Sleepwalk Collective together with Sammy Metcalfe, with whom she creates shows for theatres and alternative spaces that have toured 4 continents, receiving numerous international awards and nominations for their innovative contributions in the field of performing arts.

She also currently works as an independent artist creating private experiences in public spaces, and exploring ways to subvert the formal conventions of theatre, dance, film and installation. Her pieces, in which perception and the body are central themes, transit through diverse formats, with a focus on one-on-one and immersive performance. A selection of her works includes Pandora Invite (2013), a series of interactive installations for the Montehermoso Cultural Center, the stage film [NOT] BEING HERE (2014), the site-specific Where Are Your Friends Tonight (2015) that takes place in her childhood school, and PARTY (2016), an immersive dance piece where movement is embodied by the spectator’s own body. Starting in 2020 she opened several lines of research in which she explores the development of dramaturgies based on the structure of rites of passage, as well as contemplating accessibility as a creative tool. As a series of liminal acts, she created Baptism (2021), a one-spectator immersive piece for theatres and alternative spaces that tours internationally, and [You Are Here: བར་དོ་] (2024), a triple immersive installation for the Centre Santa Mónica in Barcelona. Along these lines, since 2022 she has developed Object Permanence, a theoretical-practical transdisciplinary investigation into culture and perception that delves into an anthropology of the senses and notions of accessible experiential dance, which crystallizes in projects of rewriting, adaptation and choreographic creation for blind audiences, such as the series Towards an Invisible Dance or the performative conference Reflex Acts.