She was born in Lisbon in 1966. She studied classical dance until she was eighteen. She worked for five years in the Ballet Gulbenkian, in Lisbon. In New York and Paris she studied contemporary dance technique, voice and theatre, and by then she completely cut with her ballet origins. As a dancer she also worked in France with Catherine Diverrès. She started creating her own choreography in 1987 and since 1991 she has been showing her work in theatres and festivals in Europe, Brazil, USA, Canada and Singapore. In 1999 the Theatre Culturgest in Lisbon organized a retrospective of her work.
She regularly participates in international improvisation projects and teaches workshops of creation/composition and improvisation.
Since the year 2000 Vera Mantero is dedicating herself more and more to voice and other music projects.
In 2002 Vera Mantero was awarded the Almada Prize (IPAE/Ministry of Culture) for her career as a performer and choreographer.
She represented Portugal at the 26th Bienal of São Paulo 2004 together with the sculptor Rui Chafes with the co-creation "Eating your heart out".
In 2007 Vera Mantero co-directed together with Miguel Gonçalves Mendes and edited her version of the film "Course of Silence".
For her, dance is not a given fact; she believes that the less she acquires it, the closer she will be to it; she uses dance and performance work to understand what she needs to understand; she sees less and less sense in a specialized performer (a dancer or an actor or a singer or a musician) and more and more sense in an especially trained total performer; she sees life as a terribly rich and complicated phenomena and work as a continuous fight against the spirits' impoverishment, hers' and the others', a fight which she considers essential at this point of history.