MIA
Mia is a nomadic artist whose interdisciplinary practice intervenes in disabling systems of power through site-specific performance, murals, video, and sculptural installation. Her work cultivates terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance, often created in direct collaboration with communities affected by state violence, displacement, and systemic oppression.
Rooted in intersectional and collaborative methodologies, her practice considers how disenfranchisement, political borders, and institutional structures restrict movement—of people, ideas, and histories. Through ritual, consultation, and public performance, she explores how gestures and forms can travel when certain bodies cannot.
Influenced by ancient futurism and magical realism, Mia’s work operates between timelines—evoking ancestral knowledge while imagining speculative, liberatory futures. Her projects often blend the material with the mythic, transforming trauma into ritual, isolation into communion, and fear into myth.
Mia has co-created projects across Mexico, Chile, Palestine, Cuba, Senegal, and beyond, working with land-back movements, laborers, asylum seekers, and others confronting intersecting forms of oppression. These collaborations result in public artworks that engage with shared struggles around mobility, autonomy, and collective memory.
Informed by her lived experience with paraplegia, Mia approaches disability not as limitation but as a portal. Her work transforms trauma into ritual, isolation into communion, and fear into myth—positioning the body as both witness and agent of resistance.
Influenced by socially engaged art and grassroots movements such as the Zapatistas, her work proposes aesthetic strategies for survival and solidarity in an era of ecological crisis and state-sanctioned violence. She sees art as a vital space for consciousness-raising, mutual aid, and imagining new political futures.
I was immersed in this form of ongoing, creative reconceptualization of political institutions and world systems while collaborating on a five-year project with artist Caleb Duarte in Chiapas, Mexico. We transformed a building formerly occupied by the United Nations into a cultural center and safe house called EDELO, where artists and activists from around the world could collaborate with rural communities to explore ways to use art as a form of collective resistance and direct action. While my approach starts simply—I spend time within a community, conducting research, sharing daily experiences, and working together—each partnership takes its own shape, producing something unique and site-specific.
Once inhabiting the building of the former UN, EDELO Migrante is now, since 2014, nomadic collectives creating works with diverse communities around the world. Performances and public interventions are created with asylum seekers, freedom fighters, and others, using principles of reciprocity and care to build a repertoire of ancestral knowledge and creative expressions rooted in lived experience and collective wisdom.
Rollow’s work has been featured most recently in a survey exhibition at UC Santa Cruz. It's been also shown in The Red Cat Gallery, New York; Casa de Americas, Cuba; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Canada; Paco das Artes, Brazil; Reina Sofia Museum, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Wien Museum, Vienna; Contemporary Art Space, Uruguay; and Museo de Moneda, Chile. Their practice has featured in books, including The Art of Accompaniment: Visualizing Displacement in the Americas (Upcoming, Duke UP) and Zapentera Negra, as well as journals including Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Barbarie Pensar Con Otros, and Momus. She is currently an artist-in-resident at UCSC. Rollow received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
