ARTIST BIO

Mabel Valdiviezo is an award-winning Latine filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist whose work centers the immigrant and femme body as a site of cultural sovereignty, narrative reclamation, and collective healing.

 

Working across film, mixed-media painting, video art, performance, installation, and socially engaged art, her practice is grounded in the Latinx community and her identity as an immigrant and indigenous Peruvian artist living in the diaspora. She is also drawn to the possibilities of tech and interactive art as ethical tools for social and land justice.

 

Her documentary Prodigal Daughter has screened at 30 venues across the U.S. and internationally, earning several awards and a Cinema Tropical nomination for Best U.S. Latinx Film. Her paintings, installations, and performances have been presented at SOMArts, Galería de la Raza, CounterPulse, among others.

 

Valdiviezo is a fellow of Galería de la Raza, Dancing Earth, CounterPulse, Gotham Documentary Lab, BAVC, and NALIP. Her work has received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Fleishhacker Foundation, IDA, AXS Film Fund, and Sundance. She has been featured in KQED Arts, ABC7, Forbes, In Dance, and BBC Outlook.

 

She lives and works in San Francisco, on Ramaytush Ohlone land, in a multicultural household that bridges Latinx and Filipino cultures.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

My praxis focuses on counter-narratives of the immigrant and femme bodies through storytelling, ritual, cultural sovereignty, and healing justice. Utilizing a transnational and feminist lens, I create intimate works through film, mixed media, video art, performance, and community art facilitation. 

 

The ideas that drive my work are migration, identity, human connection, ancestral and contemporary technology, and our kinship with the living world. I am drawn to the liminal — it manifests in the in-between of mediums, the stories I tell, and the spaces where belonging is negotiated and healing becomes possible.

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Through my socially engaged work, I facilitate art-making with immigrants as a practice of reclaiming creative voice, authorship, and collective power.

 

I seek to create sensory and emotional experiences that spark reflection, presence, and transformation. My films evoke the immigrant journey with deep emotional resonance, moving audiences to the seed of action. Installation and video art allow me to work experimentally and poetically, using image, sound, and texture to reveal the unseen. 

 

Mixed media painting opens intimacy and Latinx self-representation through portraiture and luminous color, layering acrylic over family archival photographs. My performance work is visceral and spiritual, embodying the sacredness of life and our interconnectedness.

 

In my dance work, I explore gender oppression and liberation through ritualized performance with interactive tech. Collaborating with dancers on the stage, or as a solo performer, I create futuristic visions of collective female power.