MFA Student Celia Benvenutti is the recipient of this year’s Graduate Award in Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts from The Ohio State University’s Center for the Study of Religion. The award supports her research project, "The Bámbula Effect: Circular Sacred Movement in Bomba and Orisha Dance," which investigates dance as a site of sacred knowledge through the embodied practices of Puerto Rican Bomba and Orisha dance traditions from Cuba and Brazil.

The award recognizes graduate students whose research examines religious and spiritual dynamics, relationships, histories, and symbols. This year’s applicants were invited to explore the relationship between artistic practice and religion/spirituality, and to consider the broader role of art within these domains.

Celia Benvenutti is an Afro-Puerto Rican dance artist, native Detroiter and certified Dunham technique instructor.

She has been studying dance for 30 years under the tutelage of master teacher and certified Dunham technique instructor Penny Godboldo, former head of the dance department at Marygrove College in Detroit, MI. Benvenutti’s background includes extensive training in the Dunham Technique, classical ballet, Horton, Graham, jazz, traditional African, and Afro-Caribbean folklore. Celia was a principal dancer in Taurus Broadhurst Dance, a Contemporary African Company in Washington D.C. from 2012-2016.

In 2020, she was awarded the Gilda Snowden Emerging Artist Award for dance and choreography through the Kresge Foundation.

She is a member of Ricanstruction, a Detroit Puerto Rican folkloric dance troupe. Celia was an adjunct faculty at Wayne State University and a teaching artist for Living Arts, a nonprofit arts organization in the heart of Southwest Detroit.

She is in her second year of her MFA in Dance at the Ohio State University. Her artistic goals focus on facilitating and encouraging liberation of the mind, body, and spirit through black dance.