Daniela Rivera

Daniela Rivera, born in Santiago, Chile, received her B.F.A. from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006. She is currently Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. Rivera has exhibited widely in Latin American cities, including Santiago and Chile, as well as in the United States at the Davis Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture. She was the recipient of notable fellowships and grants, including The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The FONDART in Chile, and the Saint Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Recent exhibitions include Donde El Cielo Toca La Tierra/Where the Sky Touches The Earth at Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile; Praxis of Local Knowledge at the San Francisco Art Commission; and New Worlds: Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, as well as an upcoming solo exhibition at Mass Moca. Rivera works from the experience of displacement and her reality of cultural hybridism. She is a cultural producer who challenges the construction of stereotypes or categories that discriminate, isolate, and violently define other's identities. She works with ideas of displacement, memory, and cultural migration to celebrate differences and reject categorization. Rivera builds, paints, and draws spaces to be vulnerable together, where she hopes to celebrate difference and cultural exchange.