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Sylvia holds a Master’s Degree in Dance-Teaching and a Specialist title in Dance from the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School in the New York City. She received her vocational training in Dance from the Dutch National Ballet Academy in the Netherlands, Elmhurst Ballet School in the U.K, and The Juilliard School in the USA, and was nominated as Outstanding Young Dancer by dance critic Lilo Weber during her time as a professional dancer with the Stadttheater Bern Ballet, in Switzerland.

From 1996-2015, Sylvia danced professionally in small and large repertoire dance companies in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Portugal, working directly and indirectly with choreographers such as Roberto Galván at Stadttheater Giessen; Orjan Andersson, Stijn Célis, Félix Duméril, Nils Christe, Jacopo Godani, António Gomes, Foofwa DÍmmobilité, Jiří Kylián, Denise Lampart, David Parsons, Gisela Rocha, Philippe Saire, Pierre Wyss at Stadttheater Bern Ballet; with Ivan Wolfe and Frey Faust at Pool Dance Company; with Phillip Egli at Dance Company Molteni; with Massimo Bertinelli, Beatrice Jaccard, Sylvia Rijmer, Peter Schelling, Ivan Wolfe at Cie. DRIFT; and with Clara Andermatt, Mauro Bigonzetti, Stijn Célis, Marie Chouinard, Rui Lopes Graça, Rui Horta, Gilles Jobin, Jiří Kylián, Ohad Naharin, Paulo Ribeiro, Hervé Robbe, Didy Veldman at Ballet Gulbenkian; and Olga Roriz at Companhia Olga Roriz, to name a few. 

As an independent dance-maker, she created group and solo works for the Stadttheater Bern Ballet Young Choreographers (CH); at the École des Sables (SN); the NRW Tanzhaus in (DE); Spain at the Matadero (ES); and for the CCB BlackBox, Teatro Aveirenese, and Centro Cultural de Cartaxo (PT).  She especially enjoys choreographic collaborations, having created with dance artists such as Allan Falieri, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Teresa Alves da Silva, Tiago Coelho, Valter Fernandes, Iratxe Ansa, and Frey Faust to mention a few. 

As repetiteur and choreographic assistant from 2010-2014, she worked closely with Portuguese choreographer Olga Roriz, building, and setting three original works for the Olga Roriz Dance Company, The National Ballet Company in Portugal, and Teatro Guaíra in Brazil. 

Sylvia has extensively taught in various dance institutions and dance companies such as: Teatro Guaíra, Estúdios Vitor Cordón, Quorum Ballet, Stageworks Rui Horta, Companhia Olga Roriz, Companhia Nacional de Bailado, the Escola Superior de Dança, and at the École des Sables, varying her teachings from contemporary ballet, to contemporary dance and choreographic creations.

As a dance-researcher, Sylvia is very interested in the intersection between the performing arts and science, having collaborated as guest choreographer in several interdisciplinary and multimodal research projects which bring together contemporary dance, linguistics, choreographic composition, and technology to investigate alternative practices for making and thinking dance. These projects included: The Blackbox Lab: Arts&Cognition, based at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Nova University in Lisbon (2018/22), where her research work was framed around attention and habitual movement patterns in dance-making: The Moving Digits Project (2019/20), aimed to enhance audience understanding and engagement in contemporary dance performances, where her research was focused on the digital glitch and the error; and The Choreographic Coding Lab (2023), aimed at creative coding in contemporary dance practices, where she looking into AI as a tool for alternative dance-makings.  She is currently affiliated with the CFCUL - Centre of Philosophy and Science at the University of Lisbon, and the Hidden Layers: AI and Design Conference 2024 at the Köln International School of Design, Germany. 

As an invited dance researcher, she was invited to share her interdisciplinary research in dance and technology at the following research laboratories: LASEEB LAB– affiliated to the Institute for Systems and Robotics at the Técnico University in Lisbon; SOBA LAB – The Social Brain in Action Laboratory at the Glasgow University in Scotland; and at the DDCMC19,The Dance, Data and Multimodal Communication Conference at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Nova University in Lisbon, and at the Hidden Layers: AI and Design Conference at the Köln International School of Design, Germany.

Currently, Sylvia is developing a dance and technology research project entitled, The Body Logic Method – The Contemporary Dancer, a dynamic archive in the era of Artificial Intelligence - in collaboration with three contemporary dancers, a cognitive linguist - Vito Evola (Nova University, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences), and a creative technologist - Cláudia Sevivas (IADE University). This arts and science research project is funded by the IDI&CA 2023 scholarship of The Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon and is looking forward to sharing its results in July of 2024. 

In the realm of dance-film, she created the following documentary project: The Phoenix reborn from its ashes – in collaboration with filmmaker Abass Abass and The Saramago Institute, The Camões Institute, The Portuguese Embassy in Dakar and the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon; Dance in Virtual Reality Installation - a VR Installation created by the BlackBox team together with Sylvia Rijmer and contemporary dancers to document the research around her invented Body Logic Method (BL M) using Kinect, 3D point-clouds, stereoscopic images, and audio-video; and What if I can interfere with the choices my body is making? – in collaboration with filmmaker Pedro Rodrigues at IADE (t.b.a July, 2024).

Her most recent choreographic work is for 11 dancers of the Quorum Project 2024, due to premiere in May, 2024 in Portugal. 

Sylvia is currently on the dance faculty at the Superior School of Dance in Lisbon and supervises a selection of master’s degree in dance -teaching students the Superior School of Dance in Lisbon, and in creative computing and artificial intelligence at the IADE – Creative University in Lisbon.