Kat Sotelo utilizes gesture, character tropes, and set pieces to build realms in the threshold of the ordinary and the extraordinary. These compositions evoke notions of fantasy and absurdity, cinema vs. ephemera. Her choreography of moments playfully take stage in untraditional, uncontrolled environments – allowing the artist to investigate performance within the framework of chance and everyday life. Highlights of her career include holding hands with strangers, screaming monologues in Italian to an audience of old villagers in Calabria, and implementing people as household fixtures. Her current work focuses on decolonization from the perspective of a first generation Filipinx femme. Exploring her body as a site of fetishization in the American social landscape, she scrutinizes her relationship to “whiteness” through acts of deep humor and sorrow. Sotelo received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2009) and is based between Brooklyn, NY and New Orleans, LA. She is currently a 2023 Artist-in-Residence at MOtiVE Brooklyn.

Portrait of Kat Sotelo. She is tan with slicked black hair and stands inside a deep red backdrop framed by white flowers. She is wearing a brown/black striped body suit, her shoulders adorned with jewels, as she caresses a dangling leaf with her uplifted left hand. Photo by Sarrah Danziger.
ID: Portrait of Kat Sotelo. She is tan with slicked black hair and stands inside a deep red backdrop framed by white flowers. She is wearing a brown/black striped body suit, her shoulders adorned with jewels, as she caresses a dangling leaf with her uplifted left hand. Photo by Sarrah Danziger.