Mar Figueroa
Artist in Residence

Yale School of Art x Yale University Art Gallery

Mar Figueroa joins our 2026 Festival Session as the awardee of our annual open call opportunity in partnership with Yale School of Art and Yale University Art Gallery. As well as a fully-funded research and development residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Figueroa benefits from a series of mentoring sessions with Keely Orgeman, Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Yale University Art Gallery.

Figueroa is an Ecuadorian-born artist whose work traces shifting relationships between human and nonhuman life, where bodies, landscapes, and spirits exist in constant exchange. Rooted in Andean Montubio traditions and vernacular spiritual practices, her work draws from lineages in which agricultural knowledge, herbal medicine, and ritual converge, often blending Catholic belief with shamanic cosmologies. These frameworks shape her understanding of materiality and relationality, informing an approach in which bodies, substances, and environments are continuously transformed.

Her work has been presented at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and Sotheby’s Institute of Art; she is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, National Arts Club Fellowship, and Forbes 30 Under 30, and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art.