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Maria del Carmen Montoya is an American artist working in participatory art, sculpture and new media and her work is inherently collaborative and collective. She is currently a core member of Ghana Think Tank, an international artist collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking people living in the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world. Montoya is currently an Assistant Professor in Sculpture and Spatial Practices at George Washington University's Corcoran School of Art and Design.

Early life and education[edit]
Maria del Carmen Montoya grew up on the outskirts of Houston, in a Northside neighborhood called the Barrio.

Montoya's father was born in Gonzales, TX and grew up in Waelder, TX, very small rural communities ; his family has been in Texas for generations. Her mother was Mexican and grew up in Mexico but worked on the U.S. Mexican Border in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. She now operates a small import shop in a Fiesta Mart. Montoya's personal family history of immigration deeply influence her artistic practice.

Education
Montoya earned a BFA from Loyola University where she studied Philosophy and Women's Studies. She received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), in 2007 in New Media.

Career and work
Maria del Carmen Montoya´s studio practice combines participatory art, sculpture and new media. Her primary medium is the "communal process of making meaning." She describes her artistic process as seeking to "catalyze natural social phenomenon with situations that insist on the power of human-scale intervention in the presumed inevitability of everyday life". Her approach is DIY and collaborative. Montoya also states that "she believes that art can be a potent crucible for social change. Thus, her work is often about resistance and challenging norms, inverting power hierarchies and breaking rules, but she also traffics in beauty, memory, humor and other potentially radical forces for activating communities."

She has lived and worked throughout Latin America where she served as the sole interpreter for an assembly of rural farms in San Salvador, an advocate for battered women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and an English teacher for a craft cooperative in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Her work has been shown at SIGGRAPH, PERFORMA, New Museum Ideas City Festival, ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Venice Biennial of Architecture and Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras, in Morelia, Mexico, where she co-founded an artist residency for multimedia performance art.

In 2009, Montoya became a core member of Ghana ThinkTank, an international artist collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking people living in the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world. Their innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is “needy,” and turns the idea of expertise on its head. Their ongoing project, "The American Riad," transforms abandoned buildings and empty lots into an Islamic Riad: communal housing surrounding an elaborate and beautifully designed courtyard. Rather than demonizing Muslims and immigrants as a threat to American culture and safety, this project instead looks at how we can adopt elements of Islamic and African Culture to solve American problems. Ghana Think Tank is collaboratively producing The American Riad Project with Oakland Avenue Arts Coalition, the North End Woodward Community Organization , Central Detroit Christian CDC , and Affirming Love Ministries Church.

Awards

 * Creative Capital for Emerging Fields (2013) for Ghana Think Tanks's project Mexican/US Border.
 * John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Arts Challenge Grant (2017) for a Ghana Think Tank collaborative project Central Detroit Christian CDC for the American Riad Project.
 * Black Rock Arts Grant (2011), with Ghana Think Tank.
 * Puffin Foundation Arts Grant
 * Finalist for Frieze Foundation Cartier Award
 * CEC Arts Link Award (2011) for Ghana Think Tank project in Kosovo.
 * Queens Museum of Art Public Art Commission (2010) with Ghana Think Tank
 * Rhizome Commission for New Media (2009) for I Sky You, a collaborative project created with Kevin Patton
 * Artist-in-Residence Arab American National Museum (2018)
 * Artist-in-Residence Grand Central Art Center (2018)
 * Humanities Facilitating Fund Award, The George Washington University