María Contreras Coll

Women Revisiting Religion

5 October - 12:00 pm

Municipal Theater of Lloret de Mar

Main Auditorium

In her talk, Maria Contreras shares her personal experience with menstrual stigma, which began when she had her first period at age eleven and continued throughout her adult life. At school, she was not allowed to talk about it, and gynecologists only offered her painkillers as a response to her pain.

In 2015, she read an article from an NGO explaining how menstruating women in rural Nepal were not allowed to enter their homes according to a Hindu tradition, which deeply impacted her. Not only were they silenced, but they were also forced into isolation. From then on, in an research funded by National Geographic, she began a journey through places like the United States and Austria, investigating different philosophies and religions, hoping to find an answer to the question: can I be a feminist and religious at the same time?

Through a tour of different places such as Nepal, the USA and Mexico, María analyzes how women connect with “divinity” through nature, and how territory plays a key role in shaping people.

María Contreras Coll is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller. She is a National Geographic Explorer, winner of the National Culture Prize of Catalonia, and collaborates with international media such as The New York Times and Bloomberg. Since 2017, her interest has been to document how women are revisiting religion and spirituality, eliminating patriarchal practices in countries such as Nepal, the United States and Austria.

Currently, she is working on a National Geographic Society Meridian project on trees in the Mediterranean and working on her first fiction film with the support of the Catalan Government.