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In March, the world celebrates the women who transform it. Here, four Latina artists who didn’t wait for permission.
This Women’s History Month, instead of looking back, we’re looking at the present. Four Latina creators, from the precision of painting to the natural transgression of multidisciplinary work, whose output doesn’t just hold up over time. It runs ahead of it.
Firelei Báez — The Painter Who Rewrites the Maps
Báez was born in the Dominican Republic, into a home with both Dominican and Haitian roots. Her early childhood in Dajabón, the border town between these two countries, would shape her understanding of identity for good. She arrived in the United States as a child, studied at Cooper Union, and earned her MFA from Hunter College.
Her work stands among the most powerful in contemporary Latin American art. Báez takes colonial maps and turns them into visual battlegrounds: figures that are half human, half myth, in homage to Dominican folklore: the ciguapas, creatures said to walk with their feet backward so they leave no trace, and to the history of Black women in the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Her paintings don’t decorate walls. They interrogate them.
The international critical response has matched the ambition, with recognition including the Artes Mundi Prize, the Philip Guston Rome Prize, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the Soros Arts Fellowship, and the United States Artists Fellowship. Her work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, and the Guggenheim, among others.
Through May 2026, her first major North American retrospective is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. A rare opportunity to step inside a world of fantasy, critique, and identity.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia — The Writer Who Defies Category
Born in Baja California, Moreno-Garcia has spent two decades building one of the most original bodies of work in genre fiction in English. She lives in Vancouver, holds an MA in Science and Technology Studies from the University of British Columbia, and writes as if genre were merely a suggestion: Gothic horror, noir, historical fantasy, science fiction. Without apology or explanation.
Her novel Mexican Gothic (2020) catapulted her to literary stardom: a New York Times bestseller, winner of the Locus Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Aurora Award, with comparisons to Daphne du Maurier and Guillermo del Toro that don’t feel like a stretch. The story: a Mexican socialite who travels to a mansion in the hills of Hidalgo to rescue her cousin, Gothic horror with a postcolonial heart.
In July 2025, she published The Bewitching: a multigenerational saga of witches and curses that moves across three timelines. A different genre. The same pulse.
Alessandra Lacorazza — The Director Who’s Here to Stay
Colombian American, queer, raised in the suburbs of Seattle after arriving in the United States at age five. In January 2024, her feature debut arrived at Sundance and took home the two most important prizes in the U.S. Dramatic Competition: the Grand Jury Prize and the Directing Award. With that double recognition, Alessandra became the first Latina to win the directing prize in that category in the festival’s history.
In the Summers is an episodic film that follows two sisters through their annual visits to their Colombian father in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The cast includes Residente, Sasha Calle, and Lío Mehiel. Critics gave it 93% on Rotten Tomatoes (March, 2026). It was nominated for a Gotham Award and an Independent Spirit Award.
She’s working on her second feature. Worth watching closely.
Amalia Ulman — The Artist Who Saw It Coming
Born in Buenos Aires, raised in Spain. Amalia Ulman is impossible to categorize, and that is exactly what makes her essential.
In 2014, when Instagram was four years old, Ulman ran a five-month performance that changed things: Excellences & Perfections. Under her own name and with her own face, she played three female characters: the cute girl, the sugar babe, the wellness goddess, posting selfies and scenes from a fabricated life that her followers believed was real. When she revealed it had all been fiction, the art world had no choice but to pay attention. The piece was archived by the New Museum and exhibited at Tate Modern.
Since then, she has directed two features. El Planeta (Sundance 2021), an absurdist black-and-white comedy shot in Gijón, starring herself and her mother. Magic Farm (Sundance 2025, distributed by MUBI), a satire about extractive digital media journalism, set in rural Argentina, with Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, and Simon Rex.
Painter, performer, filmmaker, actress. There’s no box that fits. And that is her masterpiece.
What These Four Have in Common
None of them waited to be called. All of them built their languages from the inside: from the diaspora, from the margins of genre, from the border between the real and the fabricated. Four Latinas, four (or more) disciplines, and one shared certainty: art changes lives, breaks paradigms, and forges identities.
