Margarida Gandara Rauen/Margie (1957) is a Brazilian artist and independent scholar whose research interests in the line of culture and diversity include feminisms applied to performance studies, art teaching and creative processes. She retired from Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste (UNICENTRO) in Paraná state, where she served as a Senior Professor in the Graduate Program of Education until 2024.

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. in English Theatre at Michigan State University (U.S.A., 1987). Her advisor was Professor Philip C. McGuire (1940-2020).

Margie engaged in higher education teaching in the 1990s, mainly in theatre-related courses at the UNESPAR College of Arts (FAP) and at UNICENTRO. In 2003, she became one of three founders of UNICENTRO’s undergraduate program of Art Teaching, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023.

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 conferences and publications projects with work groups in the Brazilian Association of Research and Graduate Studies in the Performing Arts (ABRACE), The American Society for Theatre Research, Performance Studies International, and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

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. Her most recent creative pieces are the works in progress Performing_names and Brazil Commodities. 

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). In 2024, she launched the e-book Mulheres nas Artes, Letras, Ciências e em Cotidianos no Paraná [Women in the Arts, Letters, Sciences and Dailies in the state of Paraná] co-organized with her former graduate student Andréia Schach Fey, and 33 coauthors (São Paulo, Pimenta Cultural, 2024).

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).

She currently is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) of York University, Toronto, Canada.