Rosana Paulino

Rosana Paulino was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1967, and continues to live and work there. She earned a bachelor's degree in printmaking from the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), completed a printmaking specialization at the London Print Studio in 1998, and received a doctorate in visual poetics and visual arts from ECA-USP in 2011. This sustained engagement with both technical craft and critical theory underpins a practice that moves fluidly across printmaking, photography, textile, drawing, video, and large-scale installation.

Paulino's work confronts the legacies of colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the structural violence embedded in scientific and ethnographic archives, placing Black women's bodies, memory, and identity at the center of her inquiry. Among her most significant works, Bastidores (1997) transfers photographic imagery onto fabric mounted in embroidery hoops, then alters the surfaces with thread and stitching — binding domestic needlework to histories of racial violence and gendered silencing. Parede da memória (1994–2015) assembles family portrait photographs into a modular structure that insists on the visibility of Black Brazilian ancestry against a long history of erasure. Atlântico Vermelho (2016) weaves together printmaking, photographic imagery, drawing, textile, and installation to map the transatlantic slave trade alongside colonial science and racial classification, while ¿Natural History? (2016) turns the conventions of natural history and ethnographic archives into a critique of how colonial knowledge produced and sustained racial hierarchies. Das avós (2019) extends this lineage into video installation, centering intergenerational memory among Black women.

Paulino's exhibition history spans major international platforms. She participated in the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022, and the 22nd Biennale of Sydney in 2020. Solo exhibitions include Rosana Paulino: The Sewing of Memory at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2018), Rosana Paulino: The Seam of Memory at the Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro (2019), The Time of Things at Mendes Wood DM in both São Paulo and Brussels (2022), Amefricana at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2024), Novas Raízes at Casa Museu Eva Klabin in Rio de Janeiro (2024), and Diálogos do Dia e da Noite at Mendes Wood DM, New York (2025). She is represented by Mendes Wood DM across its São Paulo, Brussels, New York, and Paris spaces. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM-SP), MACBA in Barcelona, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba, and the Afro Brazil Museum Emanoel Araújo, among others.

Paulino has received the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte (ABCA) Award and the Bravo Award, both in the Contemporary Art category in 2017, the Konex Mercosur Award for Visual Arts in 2022, the MUNCH Award in 2024, and the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice for the 2025–2027 cycle, awarded by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She held a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in 2014 and a lithography residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque in 2022. Upcoming presentations include participation in the 61st International Venice Biennale and a solo exhibition, Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural?, at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, both in 2026.