In the Studio: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo 

Natalia Lassalle Morillo in conversation with Natalia Viera Salgado, assistant curator of Visual Arts.

Join us live on Instagram from your phone, or watch on YouTube after, for a series of remote visits to artists' studios to bring Americas Society's Visual Arts public programs to your home. Every other Wednesday, contemporary artists will dialogue with our Visual Arts department about their work and practice. Check out the series playlist.

About the artist

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (b. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a theater and film director, filmmaker, performer, visual artist, and educator, whose work melds documentary and embodied performance in order to decentralize canonical narratives and reimagine our individual and collective histories. Her practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, collective memory, and personal mythology through collaborative research, rehearsal, and filmmaking processes. Her methodologies seek to challenge modes of creating live performance and film, examining how the event of spectating embodied narratives and addresses the geopolitical, social, and cosmological context where the work is presented. She usually collaborates with untrained performers and artists in her films, installations, and theatrical works. 

She earned an MFA in directing (theatre and film) from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in drama from the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include: Retiro at the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea and Beta-Local in Puerto Rico, La Ruta at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Pública in Santurce (PR), [anti gone], a theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’s text translated by Anne Carson and presented at the Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, and En Parábola at Galería Diagonal in Santurce. Fellowships and residencies include The Harbor (Beta-Local, Puerto Rico), Fonderie Darling (Montréal), La Espectacular (Diagonal, Puerto Rico), Miami Light Project (Miami, Florida), and Kovent (Catalonia, Spain). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, NALAC, and the Puerto Rican institute of Culture. She is currently developing an adaptation of Greek tragedies in collaboration with Puerto Rican folk living in the diaspora. She has lived and worked in Montréal, Miami, New York, and Germany, but is currently based between Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and Los Angeles, California.

More digital content from Visual Arts at Americas Society

• Read the exhibition catalogue for Joaquín Orellana: The Spine of Music.
• Read the exhibition catalogue for Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo.
• Watch the documentary Feliciano Centurión: Abrazo Íntimo al Natural, directed by Mon Ross (2016).
• Watch videos of recent events:
  • Art at a Distance: Promoting Visual Arts during the Health Crisis
  • Curator's Perspective – Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
  • "I Am Reborn at Every Moment" – Contemporary Reflections on Feliciano Centurión and AIDS
  • Ulises Carrión – Art, Mail, Books, and So…
  • Book Launch: Alejandra Seeber – Picture This Featuring the Artist in Conversation with Guillermo Kuitca