Gilda Almeida
Creative Producer and Curator
USA
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Gilda Almeida has lived and worked on many continents, presenting and touring artists in some 70 countries. This broad experience has honed her production and management skills, sharpened her keen curatorial eye, and given her a great facility for working smoothly with artists from all cultures and disciplines.
Almeida has lent her talents to an impressive variety of performing and visual arts, including the opening and closing ceremonies of international events, film festivals, art biennales, architectural installations, Carnival parades, literary evenings, fashion shows, culinary celebrations, and more.
From 2005 to 2025, Almeida was the Director of the International Programming Department at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, where she curated, produced, and presented major events featuring artists from around the world. These included opera companies from Kirov and Peking; theater productions starring Cate Blanchett, Liv Ullman, Fiona Shaw, Peter Brooks, and the Royal Shakespeare Company; experimental theater from the Middle East, South Africa, and South America; orchestras from Beijing, Hong Kong, Iceland, Sweden, Brazil, and Estonia; exhibitions of works by Yayoi Kusama, Picasso, Tadao Ando, and Norman Foster; and fireworks art by Cai Guo-Qian.
Almeida also co-curated and produced international festivals at the Center, each involving 500 to 1,000 artists and drawing as many as 400,000 visitors. Many focused on geographic areas—Cuba, Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula, the Nordic countries, India, the Arab World, Japan, China—and she published art books to complement eight of them. From 2014 to 2020, she also presented the annual World Stages series, which brought the best of international theater to Washington, DC, with performances and exhibits from 26 countries.
Most recently, Almeida co-curated the Kennedy Center’s festival series focusing on the intersection of the arts and the environment. Themes included rivers (RiverRun), forests (Reach to Forest), and space (Earth to Space: Arts Breaking the Sky), with each event bring together hundreds of scientists, visual artists, performers, designers, and researchers.
In 2025, Almeida co-founded Urucum Global Arts and now serves as Executive Producer.
