bio
Arlene Mejorado is a lens-based artist from Los Angeles working with analog and digital photography, 16mm film, video, archives, zines, and mixed-media installations. Informed by her upbringing in a migrant household, Mejorado is interested in repair work, countering erasure and mending fragments in personal, collective, diasporic, and migration experiences within stories and narratives. Her adolescent experience navigating the San Fernando Valley’s mundane yet spectacularized movie-making landscape as well as her immersion in LA’s punk spaces and countercultural circuits fostered a critical vantage point that continues to influence her practice.Mejorado has been awarded the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice fellowship, Aperture Creator’s Lab, the DocX fellowship with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Performance Lab at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the NALAC artist grant, and the Lucie Foundation Independent Book Award. Her work has been shown at Vielmetter, Charlie James Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, USC Roski Mateo Gallery, Culver Center of the Arts, New Wight Gallery, and the International Center of Photography. Her photography has been published in Vogue, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic, The California Sunday Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from The University of California in San Diego. Her project, Caricias is currently a part of the Los Angeles Metro Art Photo Lightboxes series on view at the Hollywood and Highland Station.
pronouns: she/her/ella | self-portrait, 2023
for all inquiries email arimejorado@gmail.com