Ana Rita da Silva Costa

Ana Rita Silva Costa is a sound artist, DJ and artistic researcher. She is a PhD candidate in Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro and a researcher at CESEM – Centre for the Study of Music, within the scope of her PhD in Artistic Creation, integrated in the Research Group on Contemporary Music (ESMAE–P.PORTO hub).

Her research focuses on electronic music as a contemporary artistic practice, with particular attention to DJ performance, collective listening and club culture as a cultural, social and aesthetic phenomenon. Her work explores spatial sound and immersive audio as performative and research-based devices, questioning traditional models of musical authorship and proposing approaches grounded in embodied and perceptual experience.

She holds a Master’s degree in Sound Arts and Technologies from ESMAE, where she completed the dissertation Sound Spatialisation in DJ Performance, combining artistic research, phenomenology of listening and multichannel audio practices. Alongside her academic work, she maintains an active artistic practice as a DJ and performer, presenting her work internationally in contexts related to electronic music, sound art and music technology.

Ana Rita was a research fellow in the project Spatial Synth – Spatial Synthesizer, funded by COMPETE2030/FEDER and completed in 2025. She has collaborated with international institutions and platforms dedicated to electronic music and immersive audio, and regularly participates in conferences, panels and artistic-scientific events, presenting her research on spatial audio and DJ performance.

She is a co-founder of female:pressure Portugal, an international network promoting gender equity in electronic music, and is active as a mentor in European programmes supporting emerging artists. Her work operates at the intersection of artistic creation, academic research and contemporary cultural practices.