Guadalupe Maravilla
In 1984, at eight years old, Guadalupe Maravilla immigrated alone to the United States
from El Salvador in order to escape the Salvadoran Civil War. Maravilla was part of the
first wave of undocumented children to come to the US from Central America. Maravilla
became a US citizen at twenty-seven. In 2016, as a gesture of solidarity with his
undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name in his fake identity, Maravilla
changed his birth name Irvin Morazan to Guadalupe Maravilla.
Maravilla creates fictionalized performances, videos, sculptures and drawings that
incorporate his pre-colonial Central American ancestry, personal mythology, and
autobiography. Through his multidisciplinary studio practice, Maravilla traces the history
of his displacement, interrogates the parallels between pre-Columbian cultures and our
border politics.
Maravilla has performed and presented his work extensively in venues such as the
Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Bronx Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, MARTE (El Salvador), Central America Biennial X
(Costa Rica), XI Nicaragua Biennial, Performa 11 & 13, Fux-Box Festival, Exit Art and
the ICA in Miami (2019). Residencies include; LMCC Workspace, SOMA, Skowhegan
and Drawing Center. Awards and fellowships include; Franklin Furnace, Creative
Capital Grant, Joan Mitchell, Art Matters Grant + Fellowship, Virginia Museum of Fine
Arts Fellowship, Dedalus Foundation Grant and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Award.
Joshua Chambers-Letson is a writer and performance theorist working at the intersection of performance studies, critical race theory, political theory, and queer of color critique. An associate professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University he is the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013). His academic writing has been published in edited volumes and journals including Social Text, Political Theory, Criticism, MELUS, TDR, and women & performance. Art writing has appeared in catalogues for Teching Hsieh’s exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the Chrysler Museum/Grey Art Gallery’s Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, as well as Dirty Looks, The Brooklyn Rail, ASAP/J, and the Walker Reader. With Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o he is a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art, specialized in Latin American art. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th Century Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. She was the Chief Curator at the Museum of Latin American Art, MOLAA in Long Beach; the Director and Chief curator of the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation (CIFO) and the Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection, Miami, USA, and the Director of Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela. Fajardo-Hill was guest curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, between 2013-2017 as co- curator of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, a Getty PST LA/LA a ground breaking survey of radical artistic practices by women artists in Latin America, Latina and Chicana artists, under the umbrella of the Getty PST LA/LA initiative, that inaugurated at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in the Fall of 2017, and travelled to The Brooklyn Museum, New York and Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo, in 2018. She is presently lecturer at USC Roski School of Art & Design and visiting scholar at UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, developing research for the touring exhibition (and publication) XicanXperimental at the Phoenix Museum, Arizona and the Perez Museum, Miami in 2021.
Presently she is co-editor of two tomes on 20th and 21th – century Guatemalan art, a Cultural Agents initiative of Harvard University and Arte GT 20/21 in Guatemala Presently, and the editor of Remains Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction, on post-90s abstract art from Latin America.
Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by a rethinking of the meaning of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Often inspired by the natural world, Fernández frequently places importance in her choice of medium, employing gold, graphite, and other minerals that have complicated histories often tied to colonialism. She is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she was the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. In 2016, Fernández directed and developed the U.S. Latinx Arts Future Symposium at the Ford Foundation.
Fernández’s works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Janel Martinez is an entrepreneur and multimedia journalist. She’s a staunch advocate for Afro-Latinidad, founding award-winning blog, Ain’t I Latina?, an online destination celebrating Afro-Latinas (women of African descent with roots in Latin America). Martinez’s platform has featured interviews with prominent Afro-Latinas, including Zahira Kelly (Bad Dominicana), singer Amara La Negra, and author and educator Nadia Lopez, among other women.
The Bronx, NY native is a frequent public speaker discussing media, tech, entrepreneurship, culture, and identity, as well as diversity at conferences and events for Bloomberg, NBCU, Oath, SXSW and more. She’s appeared as a featured guest on national shows and outlets, such as BuzzFeed, ESSENCE, NPR, and Sirius XM, and her work has appeared in Univision Communications, Oprah Magazine, and The New York Times. The Honduran-American has been nominated for the 20th Annual Rosoff Award in the 20-Something Category and won the Afro-Latino Festival of New York’s Digital Empowerment Award.
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Latinx Art Sessions 