Brenda Torres-Figueroa
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Brenda Torres-Figueroa
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.
Premiered at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Residual is a three-act interdisciplinary performance installation investigating displacement, ecological memory, silence, and collective presence through movement, sound, landscape, and embodied ritual. T
Photo: Chloe Kirchmeier/MSU Broad Art Museum
Featured Artworks
Dos mil Veintiséis, 2024
Dos mil Veintiséis is a process-based sand installation investigating memory, militarization, ecological residue, and Black fatherhood through personal and collective histories in Puerto Rico. Using layered sands collected primarily from Culebra, Maunabo—
Photo provided by the artist
Sand Installation
Residual, 2025
Premiered at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Residual is a three-act interdisciplinary performance installation investigating displacement, ecological memory, silence, and collective presence through movement, sound, landscape, and embodied ritual. T
Photo: Chloe Kirchmeier/MSU Broad Art Museum
Site-specific performance installation
Quimeras, 2024
Quimeras centers two spoken portraits of cimarrones—escaped enslaved people—etched onto mirrors and inspired by poems from the unpublished collection Cimarrón by Mayra Santos-Febres. The installation reflects on resistance, fugitivity, and liberation with
Photo by Herminio Rodriguez
Mixed media installation with mirrors, natural materials, and video
Refugio (The Curtains), 2024
Part of the long-term interdisciplinary project Dressed as Home and Refuge, this installation investigates displacement, domestic memory, migration, and intergenerational forms of protection through repurposed lace curtains installed throughout El Schombu
Photo provided by artist
Site-specific installation with repurposed lace curtains
nstalación Refugio (Enaguas), 2000–Present
This ongoing installation and performance work uses inherited enaguas (underskirts) as an embodied archive investigating maternal lineage, Black visibility, generational silencing, domestic labor, and protection. The enagua—originally inherited from the a
Photo by Herminio Rodriguez and Artist
Performance and installation with repurposed undergarments
An Ocean Without Red Boats, 2002–2022
Originally performed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and reperformed twenty years later by the artist’s daughter, An Ocean Without Red Boats investigates intergenerational memory, migration, domestic violence, and Puerto Rican coloni
Photo by Klaus Einsenlohr and Herminio Rodriguez
Performance, custom garment, archival documentation, and digital media