Irene Villaseñor (Aeta, Chinese, Ifugao, and Purépecha) examines art and culture, bi-societal experiences, Indigeneity, injustice, community-building, care, and trauma. She’s been (or still is) an artist, administrator, community educator, documentary filmmaker, intrapreneur at PBS, advocate for survivors of violence, organizer, training institute director, writer, and family caregiver. It’s resulted in receiving the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice’s Women We Love, Women We Honor Award, Catalog for Giving’s Urban Hero Award, being part of the team at American Documentary | P.O.V. that received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, and the New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2021 City Artist Corps Grant and Barbara and Carl Zydney Grant for Artists with Disabilities.
Irene is an Indigenous Data Sovereignty Fellow at the Curationist, co-curator for Bespoke Next Gen (an online and NYC-based, all queer, all genre reading series), and advisor to the Chinese American Planning Council, Metropolitan Museum of Art (for their Advisory Committee on Cultural Engagement and Visiting Committee on Education), and National Museums Northern Ireland regarding their efforts to care for, exhibit, and/or repatriate Indigenous objects in their collections. Irene has been a funding panelist for Creative Capital, the Ford Foundation, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and elsewhere.
Her writing appears in Queer Nature: An Ecoqueer Poetry Anthology, My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, Nat. Brut, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, The Santa Fe Writers Project's Quarterly Journal, and The Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. This weekend she will be reading some of her poetry at the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It's Kept, as part of a marathon poetry reading honoring the history of A Gathering of the Tribes. Founded in 1991 by poet and artist Steve Cannon, Tribes provides a platform for traditionally under-represented artists and writers, amplifying the emerging and established revolutionary voices of our time.
