Artists
Discover more about the artists in residence at Floresta Cultural:
Elliot Sheedy
Elliot Sheedy is a musician, music producer, director, and actor. He is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
He holds a degree in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Pittsburgh and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Media Art and Cinema at Emerson College in Boston.
Through his multidisciplinary work, Elliot Sheedy not only creates the visual elements but also the musical components for his dramatic works, which combine cinema, creative storytelling, and musical composition.
Elliot stages unusual worlds that transport audiences to other dimensions of consciousness.
Filipa Gomes
Filipa Gomes completed a Master’s degree in Music Education, specializing in violin, at the University of Aveiro (2021). Since 2017, she has worked professionally with orchestras, including the Orquestra Clássica de Espinho, Orquestra Filarmónica de Braga, Orquestra da Costa Atlântica, and the Sinfonietta de Ponta Delgada, performing under the direction of several conductors.
She has created and co-created various artistic and social projects, which she has shared with elderly people, individuals experiencing homelessness, and children.
Her current collaboration with Luís Senra has resulted in the performance “Reflexos de Origem” (improvised poetry and music) and in workshops that promote listening as a tool for self-awareness. She teaches violin at the Escola de Música de Rabo de Peixe and at Academia Quadrivium (Santa Clara). In the field of education, she created “As aventuras da Bzz” (2025), a music-theatre work for early childhood. She also attended the immersive training program for early childhood arts, “i.lab 2025,” organized by Companhia de Música Teatral (featuring contributors such as Helena Rodrigues, Paulo Maria Rodrigues, Jorge Parente, among others).
Luís Senra
Luís Senra is a musician and artist from Rabo de Peixe who develops a body of work that explores the places we move through and inhabit as elements of self-reference, expansion of consciousness, personal transformation, and a sense of belonging.
Through experiences and performances, his work invites and values observation, exploration, recognition, reflection, and meaning-making.
He has developed performances, workshops, experiences, and artistic residencies within the programs of art festivals and cultural spaces across different islands of the Azores, mainland Portugal, and Spain.
In 2020, he won the Jovens Criadores Walk&Talk award, a program that recognizes emerging Azorean creators.
Mariana Medeiros
Mariana Pacheco de Medeiros studied Theatre at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema.
As a creator, her most recent works include “Itinerarium,” an installation presented in May 2021 at Vaga; “A vaca que se perdeu do resto da manada,”a video art project developed during the Laboratório de Imagem e Movimento and exhibited in October 2021 at the FUSO INSULAR Festival; “um baile num buraco negro,” an installation included in the exhibition Quatro Quatro at Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas between November 2021 and February 2022; and “LOBA,” a performance presented at Arquipélago in January 2023 and at the Temps d’Images Festival in Lisbon in October of the same year.
As a creator, she is interested in fictionalizing her own biography and in crossing artistic disciplines, particularly writing, video, and performance.
Pedro PMDS
PMDS is an ambient/techno electronic music project by Pedro Sousa and Filipe Caetano, both driven by an (un)controlled passion for analog equipment, synthesizers, and gadgets known only to similarly minded freaks.
After the band’s first album, PMDS – PMDS (Thisco, 2011), they released their second LP Caloura (Variz, 2021), which was widely acclaimed and led them to perform concerts throughout the country and abroad. In 2024, the album Música Para Miradouros (Marca Pistola, 2024) was released, the result of several live recordings.
In their concerts, they make a point of bringing part of their arsenal of instruments in order to build a sonic journey into the subconscious, fading memories, and abstract thought, playing and manipulating the instruments in the moment, without a safety net, allowing something increasingly rare in concerts to occur: human error.
Sofia Caetano
Sofia Caetano holds a BFA in Fine Arts – Painting from the Faculdade de Belas-Artes of the Universidade de Lisboa.
She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Media Art at Emerson College in Boston, USA, where she later taught. Her work focuses on writing and directing film, as well as researching and experimenting with its relationship to installation and the resulting exhibition space/staging.
She explores comedy, audience interaction, and the toxicity of the contemporary world. Her work has been shown in festivals and in both group and solo exhibitions, including Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado (Sonae Media Art Award), FUSO Anual de Vídeo Arte Internacional de Lisboa, and Ann Arbor Film Festival.