Jesús Quintero "Benjamín"

Jesús Quintero, known as Benjamín—a name given through his Santo Daime spiritual practice—is a theatre practitioner and scholar specializing in the dramaturgy of trauma, death, and healing. His work combines psychoanalytic theory, ritual knowledge, and performance studies to explore trauma as an embodied, transformative process, challenging traditional grief narratives through interdisciplinary performance lectures and proposing Theatre of Death as a conceptual methodology.

With over two decades of international experience as an actor, director, and educator, Jesús holds an MS in Art Education from Florida State University and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. His current project, Theatre of Death: The Agony of Omayra Sánchez, investigates the dramaturgy of trauma through voice, image, and embodied possession.

Project Title: Theatre of Death: The Agony of Omayra Sánchez — Grief Porn, Miração, and the Dramaturgy of Trauma

Project Description: Theatre of Death: The Agony of Omayra Sánchez reexamines trauma as a living dramaturgy—an embodied, transformative process rather than a static event. Drawing from psychoanalysis, Santo Daime ritual, and the concept of miração, it explores grief as a visionary encounter that unbinds the self and opens a portal to ongoing trauma. Through voice, image, and embodied reflection, the work invites a renewed ethical engagement with mourning as a dynamic choreography of grief.

Project Inspiration: Inspired by the tragic death of Omayra Sánchez, a 13-year-old victim of the 1985 Armero disaster in Colombia, whose image became a global symbol of suffering, this project resists treating her story as a passive spectacle. I was only slightly younger than Omayra at the time, and I vividly remember following her agony and death. 

Her spirit is now compelling me to tell her story, engaging me in an ethical exploration of trauma and mourning through her gaze.

Academic Interests: My academic interests and research center on the dramaturgy of trauma and death as methodology, embodied and ritual performance, including spiritual possession, psychoanalytic theory applied to performance studies, decolonial and Indigenous approaches to theatre and ritual, and performance as a practice of healing, social justice, and collective memory transmission.