Carissa Samaniego
Biography
About
Carissa Samaniego is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work builds visual narratives of American identity with a feminist, mestiza voice. Raised between a small town on the prairie in the upper-Midwest and a Nuevomexicano family rooted in the borderlands of the Southwest for twelve generations, her family history straddles geographic and cultural borders. She uses sculpture, textiles, video, drawing, and found/borrowed text as both the tools and products of narrative and philosophical inquiry. Mulberry tree stumps, heirloom quilts, regional non-fiction, holy figurines, piñatas, illicit fossils, home videos, taxidermy and neon signs are among the subjects interwoven into non-linear narratives that explore the intersection of place and identity.
She exhibits regionally throughout the American west, in the greater United States, and internationally in Europe and Asia. Recent project sites include Franconia Sculpture Park (MN), Kidwelly Industrial Museum (Wales, UK), Galerie Klatovy Klenova (CZ), the Border Art Residency (TX), and Union Hall (CO). She has received awards from the INSITE Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Awesome Without Borders, the McKnight Foundation, Forecast Public Art, and International Sculpture Center. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (CO) and a BA from Saint Catherine University (MN).