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 artistic practice unfolds as an affective and process-based inquiry into memory and displacement. Drawing from family archives, obsolete formats such as 8 mm film, together with digital video, photography, and generative text, she constructs fragmented narratives that move between the intimate and the collective, the analog and the digital. Recognized for her expertise in video and technological media, Zurilla transforms the written word into visual imagery. Since relocating to Miami in 2017, environmental dynamics have significantly shaped her work, which revolves around the themes of memory and belonging.
In recent years, Zurilla has received multiple grants and awards, including The Ellies Cinematic Award (Oolite Arts, 2025), the Green Space Miami Open Call Award, (Green Foundation, 2025), the No Vacancy Public Art Award (City of Miami Beach, 2024), Miami Individual Artist Grants (Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, 2025, 2024, 2023), 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 in institutions such as 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). It is also part of important institutional collections, including Fundación Museos Nacionales (Venezuela), Colección Mercantil, ExxonMobil Art Collection, and the Luciano Benetton Collection.
STATEMENT
My artistic practice unfolds as an affective and process-based inquiry into memory and displacement. Drawing from family archives, obsolete formats such as 8mm film, together with digital video, photography, textiles, and generative text, I construct fragmented narratives that move between the intimate and the collective, the analog and the digital. 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, invisible, and deeply atmospheric. This mutable condition informs the way I work with space, which is not a mere container but an active material. In my installations, formal decisions—the use of materials, devices, and scales—respond to that same fluctuating logic, generating site-specific constructions where the technical and the poetic intertwine, and time can be perceived both as accumulation and as residue.
From this sensibility, I am drawn to the exiled gaze and its ability to detect fractures in time and representation. Migration and environmental crisis run through my work as forces that shape identity and belonging. Each project emerges from a rigorous conceptual framework yet remains open to intuition, affect, and material contradiction.
Through visual compositions that summon multiple temporalities and sensory layers, I seek to open spaces of resonance—where viewers encounter not a single narrative, but a constellation of signs, remnants, and rhythms that reveal the unusual within the familiar.
