Dr Salgado is an academic leader, dance scholar, and former principal dancer with over thirty years of experience in dance performance, education, arts administration, research, and curation. Since 2024, she has served as Head of Academic and Contextual Studies and Postgraduate Programme Leader at the School of Dance. In this role, she provides strategic leadership in curriculum and programme development, learning and teaching, and research advancement. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), Dr Salgado brings a dynamic and forward-thinking vision to the field of dance in higher education.

Prior to her current appointment, Dr Salgado held academic and programme leadership positions in the UK. She served as Director of Programmes and Senior Lecturer in Dance at Middlesex University London. Previously, she was appointed as Senior Lecturer at Kingston University and The Royal Academy of Dance, where she was responsible for designing and developing undergraduate programmes from inception through to validation, as well as overseeing quality assurance and quality enhancement processes, teaching, and research supervision. She brings extensive international experience to the Academy, having taught across Europe and Asia and presented her research at major conferences throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. 

Beyond her institutional commitments, she has contributed to the broader dance sector through governance and peer review, including serving on the Executive Committee of The Society for Dance Research, the Editorial Advisory Board of The Dance Research Journal, and as Chair of the London Regional Committee of The Royal Academy of Dance. Dr Salgado regularly undertakes external examining duties for universities and conservatoires across the UK.

As an interdisciplinary researcher, award-winning creative, and artist-scholar, Dr Salgado’s practice-led research is situated at the intersection of performance, cultural studies, film, and the archive. Her work explores the body and embodied experience as epistemological gateways to knowledge production in practice-based contexts. She is the recipient of multiple international awards for her creative work in screendance, including Best Film (Florence, Italy), the Dance Film Prize and Best Experimental Film (London, UK), Best Underwater and Best Aerial Cinematography (Amsterdam, Netherlands), and the Audience Choice Award (San Juan, Puerto Rico).

Dr Salgado holds a PhD from Kingston University (2021), awarded for research on embodiment, archives, and historiography through practice-as-research (PaR). She completed her MA in Dance Cultures, Histories and Practices at The University of Surrey, where she was awarded the Pauline Hodgens Memorial Prize. Following a performance career in German opera houses, she graduated with distinction from the Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma at The Royal Academy of Dance (London). She is an alumna of The John Cranko School (Stuttgart) and the María de Ávila Higher Conservatoire of Dance (Madrid).