Brenda Torres-Figueroa

Interdisciplinary Artist, Arts Educator, and Curator

2021 Make a Wave

Visual Arts

Brenda Torres-Figueroa (she/her/ella) 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,a 2021 3Arts Make a Wave awardee, and received support from the Mellon Foundation for Quimeras. Her work has been presented at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, the Avery Research Center, the 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 The Puerto Rican Agenda of Chicago 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

Two black and white photographs are hanging on a white wall. One is in a white frame the other is in a frame built to look like an open window. One is an image of the sky and other other is an image of someone looking out the window.

La Ventana (The Window), 2021

Featured Artworks

A circled image of two children wrestling created with sand.

Dos mil Veintiséis, 2024 Sand Installation

A diptych of a performance where a performer is wearing a white shroud and standing behind a white doll house and carrying a chair.

Residual, 2025 Site-specific performance installation

Portraits framed with wood, flowers and rope hang in an installation room.

Quimeras, 2024 Mixed media installation with mirrors, natural materials, and video

A white fabric wrapped across the front of the building.

Refugio (The Curtains), 2024 Site-specific installation with repurposed lace curtains

White fabric hanging on the wall and an image of a person wearing draped white fabric.

Instalación Refugio (Enaguas), 2000–Present Performance and installation

A black and white image of someone looking out a window.

Del Verbo Existir, 2021 Digital image on rag paper, edition of 5