BIOGRAPHY
Julia Zurilla (Caracas, Venezuela) lives and works in Miami, Florida. She holds a BFA in Painting and Mixed Media and an MFA in Contemporary Art Representation Systems from IUESAPAR, as well as a degree in Fashion Design from IUDLM, Caracas.
Her practice encompasses experimental video, installation, photography, archival materials, and written language, establishing a dialogue between analog and digital media. Drawing on 8 mm family archives and contemporary technologies, she constructs fragmented narratives that explore memory, displacement, and belonging. Since relocating to Miami, the environmental transformations of South Florida and the Caribbean have acquired a growing presence in her work, intertwining with questions of migration and identity.
Zurilla has received The Ellies Cinematic Award from Oolite Arts, the Green Space Miami Award, the No Vacancy Miami Beach Public Art Award, Miami Individual Artist Grants, and the Corral & Cathers Artist Fund Grant. Her work has been presented at institutions including Galería de Arte Nacional, CIFO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, Coral Gables Museum, and Americas Society in New York. Her work is held in collections including the Imago Mundi Collection, Italy; Colección Mercantil; ExxonMobil Art Collection; and Fundación Museos Nacionales, Venezuela.
STATEMENT
My artistic practice unfolds as an affective, process-based inquiry into memory, displacement, and belonging. Working across experimental video, installation, archival materials, photography, and written language, I construct fragmented narratives that move between the intimate and the collective, the personal and the historical. By bringing analog and digital media into dialogue, I explore how technology and emotion coexist within the act of remembering.
I conceive memory as a meteorological phenomenon—unstable, recurring, and atmospheric. This understanding shapes my approach to space, not as a neutral container but as an active material. In my site-responsive installations, images, devices, materials, and scales come together in configurations where the technical and the poetic intertwine, and time is experienced as both accumulation and residue.
From this sensibility, I am drawn to the exiled gaze and its capacity to register fractures in time and representation. Migration and environmental transformation emerge as forces that shape identity and belonging. Through compositions that bring together multiple temporalities and sensory layers, I seek to create spaces of resonance—constellations of traces and rhythms that reveal the unfamiliar within the familiar.