Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez

Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez is an Argentine/Chilean/American visual artist currently based in NYC. She received her BFA from RISD and MFA from Yale. Her work often begins with a camera as a drawing tool, exploring cities and landscapes to find surfaces, patterns, and other particularities that she transforms back in the studio. Central to her practice is experimenting with materials like paper pulp and light-sensitive chemistry to create photograms, rubbings, and architectural casts that evoke past or imagined landscapes. These processes merge photography, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, often incorporating text from an archive of her father's poetry and collaborations with her niece, also a poet. She also creates large-scale installations that replicate the original scale of a site, weaving personal, familial, and location-specific narratives. Through these projects, she explores how objects and textures communicate deeper stories about home, identity, and memory. She is particularly drawn to the "ghost print"—the imperfect, elusive image—as it captures a sense of memory that is always in flux and never fully clear.

Recent awards and residencies include: Yale Norfolk Teaching Fellowship, Silver Art Projects Residency, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Center for Book Arts Residency, LES Printshop Residency, LMCC Community Engagement Grant, among others. Claudia is co-founder of LAZO, an art collective that brings together Latinx artists to create participatory projects.