Estefania Miranda, born in Chile under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, managed to leave the country at the age of 15 and completed her dance studies in Edinburgh/Scotland and at the Tilburg University of the Arts/Netherlands. She became a soloist with the Ismael Ivo Company at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar in her third year. Ismael Ivo, the enfant terrible of political dance theater, co-founder of the Impuls Dance Festival Vienna and director of the Biennale Venice/Dance, created impressive roles for her, such as Medea in Medeamaterial after Heiner Müller. The productions Der nackte Michelangelo, directed by George Tabori at the Schaubühne Berlin, and Auswanderungen, based on an idea Ivo and Heiner Müller had for Antonin Artaud, attracted particular attention. International tours followed. During this time, Estefania Miranda developed her first own choreographies for the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and was a lecturer at the Leipzig University of the Arts from 1998-2001. In 2000, the director Susanne Lietzow brought her into the ensemble of the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar as an actress and a long-term collaboration developed in which she repeatedly played leading roles, such as Marie in Woyzeck.
From 2003, projects as a dancer and actress followed, including at Schauspiel Hannover, Theater Phönix Linz, with Marina Abramovic in Paris and Hans van den Broeck, co-founder of Les Ballets C de la B, in Vienna.
In 2009, she founded the company Estefania Miranda and acquired her own production center with stage and café in Berlin. Parallel to her choreographic work, she became curator for dance at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and artistic director of the Weimar International Dance Festival in 2010. In 2013, Estefania Miranda moved to Bern Ballet as Director, where her work as a choreographer and curator ensured that performances were always sold out. Her immersive choreographies Four Seasons and La Divina Comedia, in which the boundaries between stage and auditorium were removed, received particular acclaim. Under her direction, a tour of China was realized and the company moved into new rehearsal rooms. The ensemble also received the Swiss Dance Prize for contemporary dance in 2015 and the Pro Senectute Prize for its work with senior citizens in 2019. She founded the “Tanzplattform Bern” festival to promote young talent and implemented comprehensive medical care for ensemble members as well as establishing the first retraining fund for a Swiss dance company.
At the end of 2021, Estefania Miranda stepped down because of health reasons and continued to work for Bern Ballet as a curating consultant for the 2023/24 and 2024/25 seasons from spring 2022. In 2023, she founded a dance project in Costa Rica to research the dance rituals of the indigenous Maleku tribe and is developing a dance project in Nicosia/Cyprus, the last divided capital in the world. In her interdisciplinary, immersive work, she creates visually stunning productions that break with theatrical conventions and pose socio-critical questions about colonialism, racism and environmental destruction.