FiB Exhibitions
CREATOR AS ART
BETWEEN CANVAS, SCREEN, AND DEVOURING THE IMAGE
Womanhood, Colonialism, and Reclaiming History
PATRÍCIA COLMENERO
ARTIST
"I approach archives, historical and personal, not as settled documents but as living pressures that still shape posture, desire, shame, and survival."
EXHIBITION:
GRINGO À BRASILEIRA
July 4 – July 12, 2026
Governors Island | New York, NY
Presented on Governors Island as part of New Women New Yorkers' 2026 Arts Residency, Patrícia Colmenero's Gringo à Brasileira examines Brazil's colonial past and the foreign gaze through painting and historical imagery. Drawing on the Brazilian concept of anthropophagy, Colmenero reclaims and transforms colonial images, questioning who has historically held the power to represent Brazil and allowing those images to speak back.
EXHIBITION:
IN/BETWEEN 2026: RECLAMATION MIRRORED
April 6 – June 14, 2026
Ford Foundation Live Gallery at New York Live Arts | New York, NY
Presented at the Ford Foundation Live Gallery at New York Live Arts in partnership with NYFA, In/Between 2026: reclamation mirrored brought together 17 immigrant artists exploring ideas of identity, belonging, portraiture, land, and the relationship between self and place. Patrícia Colmenero participated as a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist working across visual art, film, and storytelling.
PATRÍCIA COLMENERO
FILMMAKER
FILM: There Were Sirens in Cerrado
In search of inspiration, a writer dives into the waters of the Cerrado to unravel the mysteries surrounding the sirens, perceived as threatening monsters and victims of rampant overfishing. Defying the unknown and determined to uncover hidden truths, she grants an interview that weaves an engaging suspense, challenging the boundaries between reality and the folklore of this narrative.
Blurring the boundaries between folklore and reality, There Were Sirens in Cerrado follows a writer searching for the mysterious sirens of Brazil’s Cerrado, figures feared as dangerous monsters while simultaneously threatened by rampant overfishing. Through suspense, mythology, and environmental commentary, the film reexamines ideas of monstrosity and asks us to reconsider the stories we inherit about those we have been taught to fear.
“What I am suggesting is that if we have been told a whole ethnic group is supposed to be monstrous, it is because the secret of the sirens must be beautifully frightening.” Patrícia Colmenero
Patrícia Colmenero is a storyteller who thrives in the in-between—between places, disciplines, and ways of knowing. Like Cladosporium sphaerospermum, the black fungus that transforms radiation into energy, she metabolizes history, trauma, and displacement into art, scholarship, and cinema. Her work blurs the lines between theory and storytelling, weaving archival hauntings with lived experience—like a footnote that dreams or a film frame that remembers.
https://www.patriciacolmenero.com/
A Brazilian writer, filmmaker, and visual artist based in New York City. She holds a PhD and an MFA and creates research-driven work across painting, experimental cinema, and literature. Her projects center women’s experiences and self-representation, alongside migration, land-based memory, and the afterlives of colonial representation.
In 2026, Colmenero was selected for the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, and she is an AAUW International Fellow (2023–2024). Her painting work from the Counter-Ethnographies project will be featured in In/Between at New York Live Arts in April 2026. Her documentary on immigration, You Are Invited to Leave, won Best Documentary at the 2025 CUNY Film Festival. Her first feature, Pool Blue (Moveo Filmes), received a grant from Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, and it is currently in post-production.
Her experimental film work extends these concerns through land-based cinema and performance. There Were Sirens in Cerrado has screened internationally, including at the Beirut International Women Film Festival and other venues across the globe, and Colmenero also performs in the work, bringing the body into direct relation with landscape, voice, and memory.
Her work also extends to publishing: she is the founder, writer, and editor of NIL, a nationally distributed print magazine about arts and culture supported by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture (2011-2012). Her novel Because Till Death I Will Hunger was published in Portuguese (2012), and its English translation is currently in query.
