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Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in 1986 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and graduated from New York University in 2008 earning her BFA in Film & TV Production and Latin American Studies.

Gallisá Muriente’s artwork includes film and photography among other media. Her works utilize the study of history, archives, and collections in relation to the environment and colonialism and use film, video, prints, and writing. She explores broad topics of human life and creation, particularly through the lens of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Topics of her art include anti-colonialism, anti-assimilation, and anti-imperialism. She identifies as queer and uses she/her pronouns.

Early life
Both of Gallisá Muriente’s parents are lawyers, her father hosting a political radio show. She attended Montessori school, influencing her community, process, and practice-based approach. She was involved in theatre. Gallisá Muriente moved back to Puerto Rico in 2013, after living in New York for nine years. She had studied abroad in Cuba. From 2014 to 2020, Gallisá Muriente served as co-director of Beta-Local, a transdisciplinary/artist nonprofit organization in Puerto Rico.

Art exhibitions and fellowships
She has exhibited at MOCA Taipei (Taipei, Xinyi District, Taiwan), The Whitney Museum of American Art (Greenwich Villiage, New York, USA), the Savvy Contemporary (Wedding, Berlin, Germany), Embajada (San Juan, Puerto Rico), among others. As of 2023, Gallisa Muriente has spoken at various conferences, events, and universities, discussing her research and works, such as for “Precarity in Film: Experimental Ecologies” at the University of Southern California, “Anti-colonial cinema practices” at the Shifting Ecologies of Photochemical Film Conference, and “A Conversation with Beta-Local” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Currently, Gallisá Muriente is a fellow for the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023-2024), a MoMA Cisneros Institute Artist Research Fellow (2022-2023), and a Puerto Rican Arts Initiative Fellow (2020-2023) and has held other fellowships including with the Smithsonian Insititute and the Annenberg Media Lab at USC.

Early works
Gallisá Muriente’s art is multi-media but often uses documentation and archives to convey and examine memory and imagination. In one of her earliest works, created during time with Beta-Local, Lluvia con nieve (2014) uses video from Paramount News that documents the 1955 transport of two tons of snow to Parque Sixto Escobar in Puerto Rico. Lluvia implements this archival footage to explore, in Gallisá Muriente’s words, “un evento que persiste como memoria borrosa en la conciencia de la mayoría de los puertorriqueños [an event that persists in blurred memories within the consciousness of the majority of Puerto Ricans].”

Her works often use imagery to cross boundaries of time. The 2015 work Huracàn uses footage from the film Huracán (1958). The repeating of a short clip creates a circular, hallucinatory effect suggesting hypnosis, thought, and mixing between times. Through this research-based, multimedia approach, her works involve the psychological, sentimental, and ephemeral. She herself also films on location in her research of transience and remembrance. Made in the same year, La Princesa (2014) is video that follows tourists around La Princesa prison, now part of the Department of Tourism in Puerto Rico. Like much of her film, it critically examines the depths of history and location, exploring temporalities through attention to visual detail and sound.

Movements into alternative archives
Gallisá Muriente’s works not only evolve with the usage of film, but they also expand into alternative forms of media such as risograph, triptych, images, and glass. Many of her pieces parallel the physical within the metaphorical or historical.

For instance, B-roll (2017) uses political material that encourages investment in Puerto Rico. The video originates from Puerto Rico Tourism Company and the Department of Economic Development and Commerce of Puerto Rico, but it is instead presented to demonstrate the “tropes” of these sorts of advertisements and the parallels with other forms of persuasive or investigatory media.

Delatoria (2017), alternatively, considers nationalism and power, cleverly using light and glass to project a photograph of Puerto Rican police. Gallisá Mueriente implements images and their recreation to extract not only the history of technological projection but also recall the notion of tourism and consumption by outsiders. Gallisá Muriente has said that her “...art works for [her] as a mechanism for feeling and thinking at once.”

Recent work
She has spoken about the volume of photography in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria, which led her to the idea of decomposition.

In 2018, Gallisá Muriente was awarded the Puerto Rico Artist Grant. She was granted $2,500.00 to support the production of the series ''Asimilar y destruir. Asimilar'' regards chemical processes and the climate as means of understanding the political.

Gallisá Muriente’s work has been screened at theaters such as Metrograph in New York City. Using footage of disaster in Puerto Rico, she balances in Celaje (2020) the temporality of the images shown and the strengths and resilience of those in residence. She draws upon her family background and linkages to her family history in order to engage in counter-historical narratives. By connecting the intimate to a broader scope, Gallisá Muriente presents an empathetic view of transformation and change. She also collaborates with musical artists for sound for her works.