Promotional poster for Arab Duende concert featuring Hanan Arts, scheduled for April 23rd at 7 pm at Miami Beach Bandshell. The poster has a red background with a graphic design of concentric circles and dots. A woman with dark hair, wearing black and embellished with jewelry, is in the center, with a photo collage effect showing three overlapping images of her face and upper body.
A woman with dark, wavy hair wearing a black long-sleeved top, gold jewelry, and purple nail polish, posing against a black background.

Tiffany Madera

Cultural leader reimagining the intersection of dance, film, and social justice

Since 2002, Miami-based artist Tiffany Madera has forged a groundbreaking career re-coding Egyptian Baladi dance as a tool for empowerment and social justice. A singular talent in front of and behind the camera, she is a visionary who embeds herself as both artist and producer, creating projects that collapse the boundaries between performance, ethnography, and lived experience.

Art as Social Action

Madera is renowned for her award-winning documentary Havana Habibi, a bold exploration of identity, gender, and diaspora through dance. Her body of work—including Dancing My Mother's Body and the global Baladi Project—extends across Miami, the Caribbean, Latin America, and North Africa, weaving local stories into global dialogues about migration, womanhood, and power.

Her projects often operate simultaneously as performance, cultural exchange, and social practice, generating spaces where art becomes a catalyst for transformation.

Theory Meets Practice

Madera offers a theory-based, community-inclusive, and Global South perspective to local placemaking through the production of films, workshops, exhibitions and multidisciplinary collaborations. Her expanded approach to the arts is nourished by her Afro-Chinese Cuban heritage, grounding her practice in ancestral memory and embodied knowledge.

A woman is getting her makeup done on a film set, sitting in front of a backdrop with leafy patterns, while a makeup artist applies makeup and a crew member holds a clapperboard in front of her.

Scholarship in Action

Education

  • Master's Degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies
    Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University

  • Master's Degree in Performance Studies
    New York University Tisch School of the Arts

Focus Areas

Both degrees concentrated on intercultural dance and film, providing the theoretical framework that grounds her artistic practice in rigorous academic inquiry.

At an awards ceremony on stage, a large screen displays the name 'Havana Habibi' as the recipient of the Hanan Arts award of $100,000, with a photo of a woman in a black sequined dress. People are on stage, including a woman in a green dress and three men, one of whom is presenting an award to a woman in a black dress, while an audience watches.

Shaping the Cultural Landscape

Through her films, performances, and leadership, Tiffany Madera continues to shape the cultural landscape—bridging Miami to the world stage while reimagining the possibilities of art as social action. Her work creates lasting transformation in communities while establishing new paradigms for how art can address the pressing questions of our time.

Available for Speaking Engagements

  • Cultural leadership and nonprofit innovation

  • Dance as social justice tool

  • Women's representation in the arts

  • Documentary filmmaking and storytelling

  • Cross-cultural collaboration and exchange

  • Global South perspectives in contemporary art

Book a Speaking Engagement

Awards & Achievements

Major Recognition

  • $100,000 Knight Arts Challenge Award with full matching grant from the Ware Foundation

  • Multiple foundation awards at state, county, municipal, and national levels

  • International project support spanning multiple continents and cultural contexts