Carmina Escobar is an intermedia artist who investigates/expresses emotions, memory spaces, states of alienation, and the possibilities of interpersonal connection through voice, installations, experimental theater, interdisciplinary collaboration, new technologies, and video/film. She seeks to challenge our understandings of musicality, gender, queerness, race, and the foundations of human communication. As an immigrant from Mexico, key to her practice is the exploration of interstitial states of being—suspensions between worlds, politics, and borders. She has presented her work in a diverse array of festivals, biennials, experimental venues, formal concert halls, and living rooms of the Mexican Republic, the U.S., and Europe.
She holds a National Fund for Culture and Arts Emerging Creator award in the multimedia category, has been awarded the U.S. Artist International Award with the Estamos Ensemble Project, and a NFA Master Artist grant, among others. She has received two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts in Mexico and was appointed regular faculty at The California Institute of the Arts. She will be at the Chinati Artist residency in MARFA in summer 2024.
At MacDowell in 2018, Escobar completed the structural score for the performance of her piece PURA Entraña that would premiere later that year at RedCat in LA. In 2024, she worked on pieces related to her main project "Our life is here," part of an expedition to the Marshal Islands. The first project was a video altar, the second was the development of a sound installation, and the third was the conceptualization of a Shamana de Cabaret project based on my experience in the Marshall Islands in regards to its nuclear legacy and its relationship to global warming.
Portrait by JP García Busio
