Born in Puerto Rico, Soraya Marcano is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from Pratt Institute. Her mixed media work has been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries in Puerto Rico, Korea, Mexico, Panama, Canada, Dominican Republic, The United Kingdom, and France; and it is represented in public and private collections. She has participated in artists-in-residence programs in New York, Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica and she has been an educator for the Bronx Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Guggenheim Museum, among other organizations and educational centers.
Soraya Marcano’s work investigates issues of mobility and islandness.
It combines new media, relational aesthetics and diverse methods of documentation, such as: imagemaking, writing and digital archives.
Her work touches upon issues of relocation and displacement; and provides a layered exploration of the ambivalent nature of transnational citizens. History has many layers and is captured by documenting the story of our families and surroundings. As in the Puerto Rican national experience, many members of post-colonial families are dispersed in different geographical areas. As we transplant ourselves to new places, we become more hybrid. In the Puerto Rican case, this is a very complex hybridism, due to the historical circumstances of its people, as American citizens of European, African and Native American heritage.