Cecilia Vicuña

Who is Cecilia Vicuña?

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and political activist who addresses pressing concerns of the modern world including ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. She was born and raised in Santiago de Chile, and has been in exile since the early 1970s when the murder of elected president Salvador Allende by General Pinochet found her in London. She performs and exhibits her work internationally; a partial list of museums that have exhibited her work include the Museo National de Bellas Artes de Santiago, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Art in General, NYC, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Vicuña has authored and published sixteen books, most of which have been translated into several languages. These include The Precarious/Precario, Cloud Net, and Spit Temple, a collection of her oral performances. In 2009, she also co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry with Ernesto Livon Grosman, an anthology of 500 years of Latin American Poetry. Ariel Dorfman of the Washington Post called it a "magisterial anthology... No better way of falling in love with Latin America."