Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian based in Brooklyn, New York. Their practice employs storytelling, archival research, tattooing, and craft-based sculpturaltechniques to interrogate the ways in which hostile architectures, borders, and coded languages are re/produced and re/interpreted on the body.
In 2019 they were awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and were a recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. Their work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and in performance at MoMA PS1, among others. They are author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press 2020) and the poetry chapbook Memory Lane (2024). They received their BFA from Pratt Institute in Printmaking and MA in Oral History from Columbia University, awarded OHMA’s Future Voices Fellowship for 2021, and were a recipient of Duke University’s 2024 DocX Fellowship: Otherwise Histories, Otherwise Futures. They are currently a Princeton Arts Fellow for 2025-2027.