Awilda Sterling-Duprey

Awilda Sterling-Duprey (born September 14, 1947, in Barrio Obrero, Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an Afro-Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist, dancer, choreographer, performer, and educator whose practice moves between painting, drawing, installation, performance, sound, video, and experimental dance. Working from San Juan, Sterling-Duprey has spent more than five decades collapsing disciplinary boundaries between visual art and bodily movement. Her practice is shaped by Abstract Expressionism, Dada, Conceptual art, jazz improvisation, Afro-Caribbean movement traditions, Yoruba cosmology, Santería, bomba, salsa, and the lived experience of Black Puerto Rican womanhood.  Sterling-Duprey initially trained as a painter and became interested in abstraction through artists such as Franz Kline. During graduate study at Pratt Institute in late-1970s New York, she encountered an art world increasingly invested in performance, experimental dance, body art, and interdisciplinary practice. After returning to Puerto Rico, she co-founded Pisotón, widely described as the island’s first experimental dance collective. From that point forward, the body became not simply a subject of her art but one of its primary materials, a moving instrument capable of drawing, remembering, improvising, resisting, and translating sound into visual form. Across Sterling-Duprey’s broader practice, questions of Blackness, gender, migration, diaspora, language, spirituality, colonialism, cultural erasure, self-representation, and resistance remain central. Her participation in the landmark 1996 exhibition Paréntesis: ocho artistas negros contemporáneos was particularly significant: the exhibition was the first collective presentation in Puerto Rico explicitly organized around artists identifying themselves as Black contemporary artists. More recently, exhibitions including Puerto Rico Negrx, no existe un mundo poshuracán, the 14th Mercosul Biennial, and her survey-like solo Aesthetics of dis-order have placed her practice within broader histories of Afro-Puerto Rican art, Caribbean abstraction, decolonial thought, and experimental performance.  Sterling-Duprey earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has undertaken advanced study in Puerto Rican and Caribbean history. Her honors include a 2025 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant, 2023 NXTHVN–Untitled Art Visiting Artist Prize, 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, and 2010 United States Artists Fellowship. Her work entered the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection in 2024, and she completed a Joan Mitchell Center residency in 2025. She continues to live and work in San Juan.