Christhian C. Diaz Silva is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and immigration legal advocate. His work deconstructs, rearranges, and exposes the absurdities of the immigrant experience and the psychological impacts of the US immigration system. What happens when a person’s sense of self erodes as their identity becomes iterated and reinforced through bureaucratic legal processes? What happens when a person spends years retelling their story and the horrors they’ve suffered before judges, lawyers, and social workers? Using migration stories as material for performances, paintings, and photographs, Christhian unpacks the precarious conditions of being labeled immigrant, undocumented, illegal, and other by dominant systems of power.
Christhian is a Professor of the Practice in Painting and Drawing at Wheaton College Massachusetts. He holds an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from The Cooper Union. Christhian has performed at the Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1 Printshop, the Museum of Arts and Design, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Center for Performance Research, The Wild Project, and The Clemente, among others. He was a 2019 SOMA Summer Residency fellow, a 2018 fellow of The Art & Law Program, and a 2013 MacDowell fellow. From 2016–2022, Christhian served as Board President of UnLocal, a non-profit organization that provides free legal representation and community education to undocumented immigrants in New York City who are at risk of deportation.
