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A close up grayscale photo of artist Natalia Lassalle-Morillo standing in front of a tree with her hands behind her head. She looks at the camera with a neutral expression.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

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Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (Bayamón, Puerto Rico) is an artist and director whose research-based practice reconstructs memory and history through a transdisciplinary and participatory approach. Merging theatrical performance, experimental film and installation, her work decentralizes canonical and colonial narratives through collaborations with non-professional performers, artists and researchers. Natalia’s projects develop across localities and narratives, exploring Caribbean collective memory and the material and spiritual trajectories that have shaped families and relationships impacted by the imperialist oppression in that region. Bringing theater-based methodologies into the camera, she rehearses an alternative historiography that revises collective relationships to the past and simultaneously foregrounds the creation of new mythologies and fictions.

Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as Amant (NY), Dazibao (Montréal), RedCat (Los Angeles, ), 22a Sesc_VideoBrasil Biennial (São Paulo), National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico , Hidrante (Puerto Rico, 2021), and Seoul Museum of Art (Korea). Natalia has been an artist fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, and participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), Amant (NY), Pioneer Works (NY), MassMoca (Massachusetts) and Fonderie Darling (Montréal). She holds an MFA in Theater Directing from CalArts and a BFA in Acting from NYU, and has taught film and performance at MICA, CalArts, and the Bard Microcollege. In 2023, she was awarded a Mellon Foundation Bridging the Divides Fellowship.
 

She has been an artist fellow at the Smithsonian, and participated in residencies at Amant Foundation (NY), MassMoca (Massachusetts), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), and Pioneer Works (NY, Upcoming). She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara, MX), TEA Espacio de las Artes en Tenerife (Canary Islands), SeMa (Korea), The Flaherty Seminar, the Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, among other venues, festivals and performance venues internationally. She has taught interdisciplinary performance and film at Bard College, CalArts, and MICA. 

Natalia was born in Puerto Rico, developing her practice nomadically between Puerto Rico, New York, Montréal, Miami, Los Angeles and Germany, but is currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and where her work takes her.

Featured Artwork

Film still of a woman floating face up in a body of water. The perspective is such that the viewer is under water and the woman's face is obscured above the water. The text reads "women here are raised to be mothers."
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo. Retiro, 2019. 3-channel video with sound, projected onto vertical blind curtains; 42:00 minutes, variable dimensions. Film Still Courtesy of the Artist.
Foreign in a Domestic Sense is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated from this US colony in the Caribbean to Central Florida in recent years.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente. Foreign in a Domestic Sense, 2023. 4-Channel Film 4k Video and hand-developed Super 8 Film, variable dimensions. Image courtesy of the artist.
La Ruta is a multi-channel film that follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo. La Ruta, 2018. 3-channel HD video with sound, projected onto piña silk and abaca fiber curtains, hammocks, 42 minutes, variable dimensions. Film Still Courtesy of the Artist.