Elizabeth Torres (b. 1987), known artistically as Madam Neverstop, is a Colombian-American poet, translator, multimedia artist, and cultural organizer whose work occupies the spaces where language, memory, and embodiment converge. Across sound, visual art, performance, and text, she explores the entanglements of identity, displacement, intergenerational memory, and ecological and social resilience. Her practice creates immersive, research-driven experiences that insist on attentive listening, ethical engagement, and relationality, inviting audiences into spaces of reflection, witness, and transformation.
Born in Colombia and arriving in the United States as a political asylee, Torres’s early experience of exile has profoundly shaped her work. She studied Media & Film and Fine Arts at Kean University, and a BA in Liberal Arts from Thomas Edison State University, and an MFA in Writing for the Performing Arts from Den Danske Scenekunstskole (2023). This combination of formal training and lived displacement informs a practice that moves fluidly across poetic documentation, installation, soundscape composition, and performative intervention, grounding conceptual rigor in material and affective realities.
Torres is the author of more than twenty books of poetry in Spanish, English, Danish, and German, with her work appearing in international anthologies and literary journals. Recent publications include The Ways of the Firefly and Would You Like to Come Home? (English/German translations by Klaudia Ruschowsky, Moloko Plus), Fábulas del Desastre (MiCielo Ediciones, 2021), and the Ambroggio Prize-winning La Lotería: Sorteo Nocturno / The Lottery: Nocturnal Sweepstakes (University of Arizona Press, 2023). A Certified Listener Poet with The Good Listening Project, Torres integrates practices of attentive, empathetic listening into both her literary and performative work, foregrounding relationality as a method and ethical principle.
As a cultural organizer, she founded the Poetic Phonotheque, an international multimedia poetry archive, and directs Red Door Magazine & Gallery, platforms that amplify experimental, multilingual, and underrepresented voices. Her curatorial and organizational projects—including Tranås at the Fringe, OPEN ROAD, RED THREAD, ARTIVAL Festival, and the Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival—extend her practice into collaborative, transnational frameworks that intersect literature, visual art, performance, and pedagogy.
Torres has presented her work in over thirty countries, speaking and performing in festivals, universities, and cultural institutions across Europe, Latin America, and the United States. She is a member of PEN Denmark, the International Centre for Women Playwrights, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her oeuvre embodies a commitment to rigorous, research-driven artistry, immersive storytelling, and the ethical expansion of literary and performative spaces—where poetry and multimedia art are not only aesthetic interventions, but tools for empathy, justice, and the reimagining of shared human and ecological futures.
Focus and main interests: The documentation of the creative & activist projects and initiatives in the various networks encountered. BIPOC + LGBTQI representation. Artistic Research. Collaborative projects with art collectives and galleries, multimedia art collaborations, curating exhibitions and organizing art events that intertwine communities and art forms. Literary translation. Poetry in all media.
Her artwork has been exhibited in Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, France, Copenhagen and the United States. Her work focuses on social justice, creative expression, artistic exchanges, and world-threading.
ELIZABETH TORRES 