Leda Maria Martins is one of the leading figures in contemporary Brazilian thought.

She is a writer, poet, essayist, playwright, curator, art critic, researcher, and retired professor from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Since 2005, she has held the position of Queen of Our Lady of Mercy in the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of Jatobá, in Belo Horizonte.

Since the late 1970s, Leda Maria Martins has been developing an intense body of theoretical work that has made essential contributions to thinking about the arts, especially theater, performance, and cultural manifestations such as the Reinado (a traditional Brazilian folk dance). Some of the concepts developed by the researcher, such as black theater, crossroads, Afrographies, orality, spiral time, patchwork aesthetics, and body-canvas, are theoretical, philosophical, poetic, and political keys built from intense reflection and the incessant search for conceptual and epistemological frameworks capable of proposing theoretical alternatives to the hegemony of white and Western thought.

Her theoretical production as a Black intellectual marks, in this sense, an important turning point in Brazilian thought and its historical dependence on European thought. From her doctoral thesis, defended in 1991 at the Faculty of Letters of UFMG, to the publication of her most recent book, Performances of Spiral Time, Poetics of the Body-Screen, in 2021, Leda Maria Martins has been constructing a dense conceptual arc based on the investigation of different philosophies and cosmo-perceptions, intertwining various aesthetics and epistemologies, from the most traditional to the most contemporary.

In 2017, she was honored with the creation of the Leda Maria Martins Award for Black Performing Arts, created by BDMG Cultural in recognition of her contribution to the field of Black Performing Arts, and in 2022 she was awarded the Milu Villela Prize, granted by Itaú Cultural, in the Learning category. In 2023 she was awarded the FUNARTE Master of Integrated Arts Prize. In 2023, her work was one of the foundations of the curatorial project of the 35th São Paulo Biennial. In 2024 and 2025 she was honored with the Leda Maria Martins Occupation by Itaú Cultural, in São Paulo. Also in 2025, the book Performances of Spiral Time was published by Duke University Press. In 2026, she received the Shell Theatre Award in the “Energy that comes from within” category for her decisive contribution to the appreciation of Afro-diasporic performances, articulating academic production, artistic practice, and social commitment.