Ariana Martinez

Ariana Martinez is an artist of Puerto Rican descent born on the U.S. mainland. Their personal geography spans various cities and towns across Kansas, Georgia, Florida, Texas, New York, and Rhode Island. Ariana currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. In 2017, Ariana received their B.F.A. in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and their B.A. in Urban Studies from Brown University. Ariana has been an artist in residence at The Steel Yard (Providence, RI, 2018), The Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL, 2019), and Directangle Press (Bethlehem, NH, 2023). They are the recipient of the inaugural Signal to Noise Award from UnionDocs and Gilded Audio (2018), and their multimedia work has appeared at The Barbican Centre (UK), The Open City Documentary Festival (UK), HearSay Audio Arts Festival (Ireland), LUCIA Festival (Italy), and elsewhere.

Get in touch with Ariana: www.arianamartinezstudio.com Instagram: arianamartinez_studio

Ariana Martinez is a multimedia artist working with print processes, drawing, sound and video. Their current work investigates processes of sensory perception and the simultaneously social and spatial process of navigating physical and virtual environments. Concerned with the ways different environments receive or resist non-normative bodies, Ariana’s unstable images and asynchronous sounds engage feelings of placeless-ness, disorientation, and the inventive place-making that emerges from necessity. Ariana works to map both the tight circles of human interaction and the broader systems which tether people together with architecture, infrastructure, and the worlds of non-human animals. Ariana’s interest in print media, terrestrial broadcast, and easily transmitted digital files of various kinds comes from a desire to make slippery work— work that subverts physical and imagined borders, evades capture, and lives many lives across many worlds.