Bio

Clara Riso graduated in Modern Languages and Literature – Portuguese Studies, at Lisbon University, having subsequently taken a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature. She also undertook postgraduate studies in Contemporary Portuguese Culture and another Master’s Degree in Portuguese as a Second Language/Foreign Language, with a thesis entitled Transnational Artistic Mobility.

She was a researcher at the Centre for Theatre Studies and the Centre for Comparative Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon.

From 2004 to 2014, she worked as a lecturer for Camões Institute, having been responsible for running the Portuguese Language Centre in Budapest (Hungary) and Belgrade (Serbia), where she was jointly responsible for organising the institute’s external cultural activities at the Portuguese Embassies.

She has been the Director of Casa Fernando Pessoa since July 2014.

Project

My project for two weeks in Faber Residence is to finish and review the writing of the texts of the new museography of Casa Fernando Pessoa, in order to build up – with the in-residence partners’ collaboration – the “voice” of the renewed museum: taking into consideration a) what Casa Fernando Pessoa has been and done for the past 25 years; b) what we expect it to be as a new poetry Museum in 21st century Lisbon; c) what Pessoa’s writings and thinking can add to literary studies and to the pleasure of reading, one of our most powerful resources ever.