Guillermina Zabala

Media Arts : Filmmaker , New Media/Technology ; Multi-Disciplinary ; Teaching Artist/Instructor

Born in Argentina, Guillermina Zabala Suárez is an award-winning filmmaker and artist, educator, and curator whose art examines the intersection between the individual and their environment. Her works have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and film festivals nationally and internationally, including the McNay Art Museum, SAMA, Contemporary, Telluride Film Festival, and Showtime Latino Showcase. Her documentary Las Artivistas won the Premio Mesquite for Best Documentary Short at the 2022 CineFestival, the nation’s longest-running Latino film festival, and her feature documentary Juanito’s Lab was the opening film at the 2021 edition of the festival in its out-of-competition category. Her curatorial experience includes two editions of the New York Foundation for the Arts immigrant program exhibit at Centro de Artes, Sound Gallery at UTSA downtown gallery, and the 2018 Luminaria Festival, among others. Guillermina is Professor of Practice of Film & Media Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio and was the Director of the Media Arts program at SAY Sí from 2005 to 2021. She holds a Master of Arts in Media Studies from New York’s The New School and is currently working on her dissertation for her Ph.D candidacy in the Doctor of Arts program at the University of La Plata, Argentina. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Media Arts Distinguished Thesis Award from The New School and the Rick Liberto Visual Arts Award from the Luminaria Foundat ... view more »

Artist Statement of Work

Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):

I consider myself a multidisciplinary artist. With my artworks I intend to capture a sense of energetic beauty in a non-traditional way while revealing the complexity of the human psyche as a social individual and its environment. Through different types of media - photography, digital video, mixed media and installation art -, I explore the ever-changing state, conceptual ideas, and sociopolitical perspectives of today’s society. Since the beginning of my artistic career I’ve experimented with a variety of techniques ranging from drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography to 16 mm film format, digital video, and multimedia. For the past fifteen years I’ve been interconnecting these disciplines in photography series such as Flores Negras, Ceci N’est Pas un Pistolet and Cultura Pop series, as well as in installation art pieces and videos such as Media Negras, 20:200, Volver, Fortress Europe: The Human Cost, and Progress, among others. Much of my artwork exposes the subtle references of words when juxtaposed with images in motion. Because of my recurrent use of text, I was invited to be a Guest Artist at the Art Talk Language is a Virus at the McNay Art Museum in 2014. Six months later, McNay curator Rene P. Barilleaux invited me to have a Solo Exhibition at the Octagon Gallery with my one-channel video I, Me, Light that highlights forty San Antonio individuals with the one-word that defines who they are. My intention as an artist is to bring out the friction and subtle balance between beauty and discomfort. Beauty because I’m constantly looking for the perfect composition and aesthetics, and discomfort because I’m affected by the lack of justice. My art is my way of detecting beauty and experimenting with it, but it is also my therapy and my way of refusing to accept those injustices as unavoidable and necessary.