Thereza Santos

Jaci dos Santos, better known as Thereza Santos, (July 7, 1930 – December 19, 2012) was a Brazilian writer, actor, playwright, professor, and activist for women's rights and for the Black Movement of Brazil for over five decades.

Biography

Santos was born in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Santa Teresa to Antonio Luiz dos Santos, a civil servant, and Marta Martins dos Santos, a nurse. Her career as an actress began early: She appeared in her first film, O Cortiço, at age 15, and later appeared in the Oscar-winning Black Orpheus. Santos studied at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia (now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and became a member of the National Union of Students, Brazil's largest student organization.

In this intellectual environment, she began to create works of street theater, with the goal of engaging audiences politically. She joined the Teatro Experimental do Negro, a theater company founded in rejection of blackface performances, in Rio and later in São Paulo. In the late 1960s, she co-founded the Centro de Cultura e Arte Negra (Center of Black Culture and Art). In the 1970s, during the military dictatorship, she co-wrote and staged with the sociologist Eduardo de Oliveira the piece E agora falamos nós ("And Now We Speak"), which is considered to be one of the first pieces of Brazilian theater written for an exclusively black cast. She was also involved in directing Carnival performances based in Afro-Brazilian culture.

In the 1960s, Santos also began to participate in the liberation movement for Portuguese-speaking African countries.