Bio

Nayda Collazo-Llorens is a multidisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 

She earned an MFA from New York University and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio in New York, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, and The Dowse Art Museum in New Zealand, among others. Her work is featured in the book Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, published by Duke University Press; A to Z of Caribbean Art, published by Robert & Christopher in Trinidad and Tobago; and The Dark Would: Language Art Anthology, published by Apple Pie in the UK. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art News, Art Net, Art US, Art Nexus, Arte al Día International, BOMB, and Newcity. She lives and works in Kalamazoo, Michigan and is a 2024-25 Rooted + Relational Hybrid Fellow at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO).

Artist statement:

I explore concepts of navigation and dislocation using a variety of mediums, including works on paper, video, installations, and site-specific works. My projects often incorporate the language of abstraction, found text, and strategies such as mapping and sampling. The video UNCLASSIFIED uses text from a 1952 U.S. government report of an unidentified flying object in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. The work takes advantage of the inaccuracies of the optical character reader (OCR) used to convert a scanned image of the aged typewritten document into text. This work plays with encoded messages, glitch, and the post-alphabetic, while pointing to Puerto Rico's colonial context and ongoing political status established the year of the UFO sighting report.