Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez is an Argentine/Chilean/American visual artist, educator, and arts administrator currently based in NYC. She received her BFA from RISD and MFA from Yale. In her artistic practice, her work often begins with a camera as a drawing tool, exploring cities and landscapes to find surfaces, patterns, and other particularities that she transforms back in the studio. Central to her focus is experimenting with materials like paper pulp and light-sensitive chemistry to create photograms, rubbings, and architectural casts that evoke past or imagined landscapes. These processes merge photography, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture— often incorporating text from an archive of her father's poetry and collaborations with her niece, also a poet. She often creates large-scale installations that replicate the original scale of a site, weaving personal, familial, and location-specific narratives. Through these projects, Claudia explores how objects and textures communicate deeper stories about home, identity, and memory.
Recent awards and residencies include: Yale Norfolk Teaching Fellowship, Silver Art Projects Residency, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Center for Book Arts Residency, LES Printshop Residency, LMCC Community Engagement Grant, Manhattan Graphic Center Residency, among others. Claudia is co-founder of LAZO, an art collective that brings together Latinx artists to create participatory projects. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows in the US, Latin America, and Europe, and has curated exhibitions at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, The Clemente, among others.