Amara Higuera Portfolio
Amara Higuera is a Mexican-American artist based in Los Angeles that experiments with the lens and its limitations to approach an identity that falls into the cracks between categories and the complex web of connections that shape it. Ranging from photography to video and sound, her body of work plays with the medium itself to question the power dynamics in photography as a form of extraction, of pulling a subject from its place in the living world and abstracting it. Higuera turns to video and sound as an alternative. She negotiates control and perspective, gathering that which spills out from the confines of a still image, as she explores what makes up a family, a community, and how a disembodied self may fit into it all. To counteract the fast-paced world of short-form content and mindless consumption, Higuera intentionally slows down the speed at which the audience can move through her work and compels them to pause. To listen. To dwell in the discomfort of what is not easy to understand. Her multimedia work serves as entry points into the spaces between. Dare to linger a while.
“Embodied Search(ing) For Headphones” (2023). Digital audio, 7:06 min, from the “Estoy Llamando, Regresando Tu Llamada” series produced during an arts radio residency at Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, a space for curatorial and artistic practices. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
“my cousins” (2016). Digital photograph. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
“i would love it if you caught me” (2021). Digital video, 4:14 min. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
“Sugar Is Sweet” (2019). Digital photograph. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
“excerpt” (2021). Digital video, 7:54 min. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
“chicano teotihuacan” (2019). Digital photograph documenting edible performance piece that was cut and eaten by participants, from the “Cake / Pastelito” series. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
“Moment 4 Life (Por Ahí)” (2018). Digital video, 4:38 min. Copyright Amara Higuera, 2026.
Amara Higuera
Artist, Publab Fellow 2026
Amara Higuera is an artist and writer from Los Angeles (the ancestral and unceded land of the Gabrielino-Tongva and Chumash peoples). She is exploring histories of precarity, resilience, and (re)generation through lens based inquiry and sound. She is currently writing poetry and making sound works as a practice of personal exorcism and artistic research.
Claudia Martínez Rivera
Portfolio Manager, Publab Fellow 2026
Claudia Martínez Rivera is a Puerto Rican PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Master of Arts in English Literature Specialized in Feminist and Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa, for which she completed a thesis titled Yo digo lo que me da la gana: Using Spanglish Translational Strategies to Redefine Puerto Rico in the Poetry of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her research interests include contemporary Puerto Rican poetry, translation studies, de/anticolonial theory and praxis, and literary and cultural production in the broader Hispanic Caribbean. She is also on the editorial board for Lucero, the Graduate Student Journal of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley.