Shenandoah Resident Artist

Over the last three years, I have explored rituals of presence and escape practiced by marginalized peoples in Miami. How does escape bring us closer to ourselves? How does it push us further away from one another? Through installations and performances involving drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and dance, I create spaces for exploring escape and connection as paths to liberation. Community, collaboration, and education are pillars of my practice.

My artwork brought me to the community that I now call family, and my current work is aimed at serving and uplifting them. Miami holds a small community at the seat of complete othering– at odds with the state, often undocumented or recently immigrated, isolated for being trans or queer and black or brown, etc. Escape becomes a powerful tool for us as our political landscape becomes more and more dystopian, as we process danger, negotiate solidarity, and attempt to maintain strength in our empathy.

I entered Miami’s fairly small queer, black, Caribbean and latin nightlife scene seeking an escape from the constant othering I faced in my day to day, and was met with a profound care, emotional presence, and political awareness in these spaces. I built my community here in Miami through offering free nightlife photography for queer events, simply because I felt alone. The welcoming and freedom I experienced there reminded me of the feeling of ecstasy found in religious or spiritual ceremonies (specifically AfroCuban and Indigenous practices). As a result, my work shifted from documentary photography toward illustrations of the threads connecting these informal communal spaces with spiritual practices of escape and embodiment. As numbness becomes a source of solace, we reject formally recognized hierarchies. I am one voice from a community holding itself together, built of artists, artisans, musicians, dancers, land stewards, medicine workers, trained and self taught, reimagining our realities and inventing new modes of survival. What are the ways we escape in order to survive? – Having studied education in my undergraduate career, thinking about how information is passed on and shared is a constant consideration in my work and life. For the past two years, I have taught art after school at Kelsey Pharr Elementary in Brownsville. Working with children has given me invaluable information about how to create collaborative work that is grounded in emotion, fluidity, and radical imagination. My students are always my collaborators, and their desires guide my pedagogy as much as my own.

Now, I create workshops and open creative jam sessions to offer my knowledge of art and dance to my community, and welcome them to educate me on their practices of escape, connection, and freedom.

Culmer/Overtown Resident Artist

My art practice is born from the convergence of reading, living, and writing. As a child of immigrants from the Global South, the lessons passed down from my parents, community, teachers, and friends have shaped my investigations into who I am as an artist. My work is driven by a strong sense of place, familial history, and the legacies of the communities I’ve moved through in my education and life.

Currently, I am based in Miami—close to the islands from which my family originates. While completing my undergraduate degree in Africana Studies, I began working in the archives of the Cuban Heritage Collection. This experience introduced me to mediums that allow me to learn, create, and share stories rooted in the Black, Hispanic, and Caribbean legacies of the U.S. and the broader Global South. Artist books sparked my venture into visual arts, as their combination of structure, design, and language creates an intimate storytelling experience for the reader. My craft centers on research, collecting found ephemera, and composing artist books whose forms support the narratives I construct. Alongside collage and paper weaving, I’m exploring printmaking techniques like cyanotypes and relief printing, each chosen for how their material qualities deepen the story I tell.

Kendall Resident Artist

My art practice is rooted in a deep reverence for nature and the complex ecology of South Florida, where I was born and raised. I’m inspired by the landscapes that surround me; the swamp, tropical fruit trees, native plants, coastal waters. My work began as a way to reflect the beauty of these environments and express a personal sense of appreciation and belonging.

As my practice evolves, I feel increasingly drawn to the urgent issues affecting both our local and global environment. I see my work as a way to connect personal experience with collective awareness. As the granddaughter of Cuban immigrants, I feel a strong connection to the Caribbean. I view South Florida as a natural extension of it culturally, and in some ways ecologically. This perspective shapes my work. I see our region’s diversity as a defining strength. Miami would not be the vibrant, colorful city it is without its many communities. I believe these contributions are worth celebrating and protecting, especially at a time when both immigrant identities and our ecosystems are under threat. I work primarily with acrylic paint and ballpoint pen. Although recently I’ve been incorporating sculpture using natural and found materials. These elements, gathered from my surroundings, root my work in place and reflect the stories embedded in our landscapes. My goal is to foster connection and awareness of these stories.

In my work, nature is a symbol for resilience, displacement and survival. Community engagement is essential to my practice. I’ve painted murals in urban gardens and led educational workshops with interactive art projects, such as creating wearable cardboard wings to connect youth with the story of the atala butterfly.

As a teaching artist, I integrate Sofia Villalonga art with themes of science and ecology. I see creativity as an experimental process. It mirrors the scientific method of observation, trial, and discovery. This philosophy informs my teaching and my studio work.

Ultimately, I want my work to be a dialogue between beauty and urgency. A way to appreciate what we have while advocating for what we risk losing. Through art, I hope to invite others into that conversation and inspire a deeper connection with the world around them

North Central Resident Artist

Niko Devera (b. 1999) is a queer Cuban-American image maker and artist, born and currently based in Miami, Florida.

Photography is at the core of his expanding practice, where art serves as a tool to translate emotion across time. His work draws from philosophy, psychology, and theology. He is currently thinking about creation, destruction, gender, performance, attraction, repulsion, attention, distraction, control, technology, surveillance, nature, and time.

He graduated from Florida International University in 2021 with a BA in Studio Art with a focus in Photography and a Minor in Art History. Shortly after graduating, Devera moved to New York where he worked closely with Matthew Leifheit- photographer, professor, and editor-in-chief of MATTE Editions and MATTE Magazine. He was Leifheit’s teaching assistant at the MATTE Institute, an unaccredited tuition-free school of photography, for its first two semesters in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024.

In September 2023 Devera held his first solo exhibition “APPETITE” at Contact Photo, coinciding with a catalogue publication by LOOK Publishing. In July 2024, Devera launched CULTMEAL an art collective and publisher, highlighting South Florida lens and text-based artists.

Naranja Resident Artist

Estrella explores the configuration of pigments, both found and created, to deconstruct the landscapes she inhabits—both physical and neural. Her work investigates the relationship between micro and macro structures, revealing how small elements echo larger systems in nature, society, and memory.

Through layers of material and meaning, she examines the movement of people, objects, and histories, visualizing the disruptions that shape our environments. Her practice embraces transformation as both a conceptual and physical process.

Working with unorthodox materials—cardboard, tape, plastic, and fabric—she challenges traditional hierarchies of art-making, using impermanence as a tool to reflect on change, displacement, and resilience. Her alchemic approach to materiality turns found pigments into portals and pillars of transformation, bridging past and present, personal and collective. By layering cautionary gestures with moments of reflection, Estrella invites viewers to engage with the complexities of social displacement and the fragile structures that define South Florida’s ever-shifting landscape.

Her work suggests that nothing is static. Memory, identity, and place are all in constant flux, shaped by forces both seen and unseen. Through this lens, she reclaims discarded materials and ephemeral elements, reconfiguring them into narratives of adaptation, survival, and metamorphosis.