Brenda Torres-Figueroa

Interdisciplinary Artist, Arts Educator, Curator

2021 Make a Wave

Visual Arts

Brenda Torres-Figueroa is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and cultural practitioner whose work bridges installation, performance, sound, photography, text, public art, and community-based artistic practice. Born in Puerto Rico and based in Chicago, her work investigates memory, migration, embodiment, collective archives, and the ways cultural knowledge is transmitted across generations, landscapes, and diasporic communities.

Working across visual art, performance, and participatory practice, Torres-Figueroa creates interdisciplinary environments where image, rhythm, movement, storytelling, and material memory function as interconnected artistic languages. Her projects often integrate archival materials, organic elements, textiles, sound, oral histories, and spatial intervention to explore refuge, displacement, ritual, ecological memory, and collective healing.

Torres-Figueroa received her B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a recipient of the 3Arts Make a Wave Grant and Mellon Foundation support for Quimeras. Her work has been presented at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, Avery Research Center, Museo Casa Escuté, and the Asian Art Biennale of Bangladesh, among others.

She is the founder and director of El Schomburg, an interdisciplinary arts space in Chicago dedicated to exhibitions, public programming, cultural dialogue, and collaborative artistic practice. Torres-Figueroa also serves as Arts & Culture Co-Chair for Puerto Rican Agenda and co-leads Colectivo Sayba, a Chicago-based Afro–Puerto Rican Bomba ensemble focused on performance, education, and intergenerational cultural practice.

Her pedagogical and artistic methodologies are deeply informed by over fifteen years of engagement with Afro–Puerto Rican Bomba traditions, interdisciplinary arts education, and community cultural work. Through both teaching and artistic practice, Torres-Figueroa approaches the arts as living systems of memory, experimentation, collaboration, and collective transformation.

Brenda Torres-Figueroa's Website