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.
Zurilla works primarily with video installation, photography, archival materials, written language, and generative text, combining analog and digital processes to explore memory, displacement, and belonging. Family archives and obsolete formats such as 8 mm film frequently intersect with contemporary digital technologies in her work, creating fragmented narratives across different temporalities. Since relocating to Miami in 2017, environmental dynamics and the relationship between landscape, memory, and migration have become increasingly present in her practice.
In recent years, Zurilla has received multiple grants and awards, including The Ellies Cinematic Award (Oolite Arts, 2025), the Green Space Initiative Grant (Green Foundation, 2025), the Artist Access Grant (Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, 2025), the No Vacancy Public Art Award (City of Miami Beach, 2024), Miami Individual Artist Grants (Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, 2023, 2024, 2025), and the Corral & Cathers Artist Fund Grant (Coral Gables Community Foundation, 2023). In 2024, she was also invited to develop a special project for the WOPHA Congress, co-presented by Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) and Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).
Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Galería de Arte Nacional (Venezuela), Coral Gables Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC Lima (Peru), Théâtre La Colonie (Paris), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation – CIFO (Miami), Museo de Bellas Artes (Venezuela), and Americas Society Art Gallery (New York). Her work is held in institutional and private collections, including Fundación Museos Nacionales (Venezuela), Colección Mercantil, ExxonMobil Art Collection, Fuentes Angarita Collection, and the Luciano Benetton Collection.
STATEMENT
My artistic practice unfolds as an affective, process-based inquiry into memory and displacement. Working across experimental video, installation, archival materials, photography, written language, and analog and digital media, I construct fragmented narratives that move between the intimate and the collective, the personal and the historical.
These crossings allow me to 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 the way I work with space, not as a neutral container but as an active material. In my installations, images, materials, devices, and scales come together in site-specific 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 instability run through my work as forces that shape identity and belonging. Each project is grounded in a rigorous conceptual framework while remaining open to intuition, affect, and material contradiction.
Through visual compositions that bring together multiple temporalities and sensory layers, I seek to create spaces of resonance—where viewers encounter not a single narrative, but a constellation of traces and rhythms that reveal the unfamiliar within the familiar.