Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, video, performance, installation
Website: lorenamolina.com
Lorena Molina was born in 1985 in San Salvador, El Salvador. The Salvadoran civil war — fought between the government and leftist guerrillas from 1979 to 1992 — forced her family to migrate to the United States, and the experience of displacement by violence has remained at the core of her practice. She received her BFA from California State University, Fullerton in 2012 and her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2015. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University and the founder and director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and exhibition program in San Francisco dedicated to supporting BIPOC artists. She has been an artist in residence at Artpace San Antonio (2024), and is a recipient of the Diversity of Views and Experiences Fellowship, the Christopher Cardozo Fellowship, two Truth and Reconciliation Grants from ArtsWave, the Idea Fund, the Fotofocus Exhibition Grant, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship. She is a founding member of Becoming Sticky, the first collective of Central American lens-based artists.
Molina works in photography, video, performance, and installation to explore identity, intimacy, pain, and the witnessing of suffering. Her practice is driven by a deep sense of displacement — the experience of being forced from a country by war, of navigating space and belonging as a migrant, of honoring people who were disappeared, killed, or silenced during decades of armed conflict. Her work asks viewers to become witnesses: to acknowledge that silenced stories are an essential part of our collective narrative. A recurring material is corn, a central crop in Mesoamerican life and a displaced body in its own right — shaped and reshaped by colonial extraction and global trade — which she deploys as both sculptural material and political argument. More recently, she has been working with a somatic approach rooted in the landscapes and ecology of El Salvador, incorporating her own breath and body into image-making to resist colonial conventions of photographic distance.
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