Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta was born in 1978 in Bogotá. He earned his BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2001, and completed his MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2003. He participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York in 2006.

Motta takes a multidisciplinary approach, and his work engages problems of sexuality, gender identity, minority culture, politics, and religion. In his quest to suggest counter-narratives to dominant history from the perspective of the oppressed, he has collaborated with academics, activists, artists, performers, and researchers around the world. Since 2005, Motta has been working on Democracy Cycle, a series of large-scale projects that interrogate aspects of democracy, including U.S. foreign policy and intervention (The Good Life, 2008) political exile and cultural assimilation (The Immigrants Files: Democracy is Not Dead, It Just Smells Funny, 2009) political and ideological genocide (Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice, 2010), and religious faith as a form of social liberation (Deus Pobre: Modern Sermons of Communal Lament, 2011).