Bio

Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006. She is currently Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited widely in Latin American cities including Santiago, Chile, as well as in the United States at the Davis Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum and the MFA. She was awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture. She was the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The FONDART in Chile, and the Saint Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Recent exhibitions include: Donde El Cielo Toca La Tierra/Where the Sky Touches The Earth at Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile, Praxis of Local Knowledge at the San Francisco Art Commission, and New Worlds: Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, as well as an upcoming solo exhibition at Mass Moca. Rivera works from the experience of displacement and from her reality of cultural hybridism. She is a cultural producer who challenges the construction of stereotypes or categories that discriminate, isolate and violently define other's identities. She works with ideas of displacement, memory, and cultural migration to celebrate difference and reject categorization. Rivera builds, paints, and draws spaces to be vulnerable together where she hopes to celebrate difference and cultural exchange. 

Personal Narrative

I was born in Santiago, Chile in 1973. Later that year the military coup happened and life as my family knew it changed dramatically. Suddenly Family members became enemies. Friends stop seeing each other and suspicion grew as an illness. While friends and family disappeared persecuted by friends and family members, the country’s economy grew tremendously, at least, according to economic indicators. In 1980 I had my first Sara Lee cheesecake and a barbie! Both signs of comfort and achievement. Little did I know that many of my fellow Chileans were suffering and I myself was experiencing unimaginable loss. I got to live through the transition to democracy while attending art school in Chile and was able to vote for president for the first time in 1994. Due to life circumstances, I moved to Boston in 2002 and I have been here since. I was able to start graduate school at the SMFA at Tufts in 2003 and with this, I was finally introduced to the art community here in Boston. I have been working nonstop since t, and just recently after my first Public Art project, a project that allowed me to connect with people in ways that I never thought were possible I am now calling Boston my home. I work from the experience of displacement and from my reality of cultural hybridism. If trauma and loss were at the center of my practice before, today I am empowered by understanding what I can share from my experience of displacement and my culturally hybrid identity.