Margarida Gandara Rauen/Margie (1957) is a Brazilian artist and researcher whose interests in the line of culture and diversity include feminisms applied to performance studies, art teaching and creative processes. She is a Graduate Program of Education Professor at the Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste (UNICENTRO) of Paraná state. Margie attended public and private schools in Curitiba, Brazil, and completed her secondary education at Middletown High School (Maryland, U.S.A.) as an AFS exchange-student (1975). She earned her undergraduate degree in English at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (1978), and a Ph.D. at Michigan State University (U.S.A., 1987), with a dissertation in performance studies directed by Prof. Philip C. McGuire.

Margie engaged in higher education teaching in the 1990s, mainly in theater-related courses at the UNESPAR College of Arts (then FAP) and at UNICENTRO. In 2003, she became one of three founders of UNICENTRO’s undergraduate program of Art Teaching, which celebrated its 16th anniversary in 2019.

Margie has served as an editor and published in prestigious Brazilian and international journals, in addition to having served as correspondent of The World Shakespeare Bibliography, and to being a contributor of Oxford University Press reference works covering Brazil and Latin America. She was a founding member of the research group Drama and Theatre of the National Association of Research and Graduate Studies in Letters and Linguistics (ANPOLL, Brazil), while also having joined several work groups in the Brazilian Association of Research and Graduate Studies in the Performing Arts (ABRACE), The American Society for Theatre Research, and Performance Studies International.

Her own artistic research  as a director and writer has pursued creative appropriations in her scripts Ofélias/A-void-ing, Juliets, and Shadows of Sycorax, which in different ways focused on marginalized women. These plays were done in an art gallery, in 13 different community venues, and in a prison with teenager girls, respectively. Margie’s applied research since 2003 has sought the engagement of the audience in site specific performance, which led her to organize the book A interatividade, o controle da cena e o público como agente compositor [Interactivity, control, and the audience as a performance agent], published by the University of Bahia Press (Salvador, 2009). Margie continues developing creative processes with several Curitiba-based artists, many of whom are her former drama and directing students.

Amongst several grants and fellowships along her career, Margie completed three post-doctoral projects as a Folger Shakespeare Library Fellow (1993, 1997 and 2003, Washington, D.C.). She was a Global Shakespeare Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK (2017) and twice a short-term resident at Artscape Gibraltar Point, Toronto (2018–2019).