María Magdalena Campos-Pons

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born August 22, 1959, in La Vega, Matanzas, Cuba)  is a Cuban-American multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, performance, painting, sculpture, drawing, film, video, watercolor, and immersive installation. Deeply autobiographical while simultaneously addressing expansive histories of the Black Atlantic, her work examines memory, migration, gender, spirituality, labor, family, and the ways colonialism and forced displacement shape individual and collective identity.  Campos-Pons grew up on a sugar plantation in a family with Nigerian, Chinese, and Hispanic ancestry. Her Nigerian ancestors were brought to Cuba through the transatlantic slave trade, while her Chinese ancestry connects her family history to histories of migration and indentured labor. These intertwined genealogies are foundational to her practice. Drawing on Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions, particularly Santería and its Yoruba roots, she uses ritual, procession, the body, ancestral symbolism, and natural elements to address histories that have often been suppressed or fragmented. Water and the sea recur throughout her work as sites of memory, movement, separation, spiritual connection, and diasporic identity.  Campos-Pons graduated from the National School of Art in Havana in 1980, studied painting at the Higher Institute of Art in Havana, and earned an MFA in Painting and Media Arts from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. She taught at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana before moving from Cuba in the early 1990s and later taught for many years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Since 2017, she has served as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, documenta, Sharjah Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Havana Biennial, Dakar Biennale, and Johannesburg Biennale. In 2023, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, followed by an ARTnews Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024 and recognition as an Established Artist medalist in the 2026 Art Basel Awards.