Carolina Loyola-Garcia, Director “Sobre Las Olas”
Carolina Loyola-Garcia is a Chilean-born multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and performer. She works primarily in media arts, including single-channel video art, video installations, video design for theater, digital printmaking, documentary, and has ventured into performance through theater and dance. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is Associate Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University.
Through her work she has explored topics related to social justice, the dislocated identity that results from colonialism and migration, and questionings around issues related to the most complex aspects of human existence such as relationships, the transient nature of the postmodern experience, memory, and the tense interaction between economy and the environment.
Her work has been shown in art galleries, museums, and film/video festivals both in the United States and abroad, including such venues as the 10th Havana Biennial; Bangkok Experimental Film Festival; Chicago International Latino Film Festival; Biennial of Video and New Media in Santiago, Chile; Three Rivers Film Festival; Biennial Arte Nuevo InteractivA in Merida, Mexico; SPACE Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA; Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; among others. She has received recognition for her work at the Chilean International Short Film Festival, where she received an award for best experimental video and best sound design in 1999 for the video “The Other Land”.
Her video “Alegria” received honorable mention at the short film competition of the Three Rivers Film Festival in 2005 and was selected as a finalist at the animation competition of the University of Film and Video Association in 2006. Her documentary “Pascua Lama: A Contemporary Quest for El Dorado” received first place in the documentary category at Festival Cine Joven, at Universidad de Chile in 2008. Most recently, in the spring of 2010, her short video “Untold Coffee Stories” was the winner of the video art festival (id)art_fest_2010, held in Italy.
Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and the Multicultural Arts Initiative, among others. During the spring of 2008 she was an artist in residence with Grupo Forja, in Valencia, Spain; and in July of 2010 was invited to be an artist in residence with the S.LOW Projekt in Berlin, Germany.
She has curated, produced, and fundraised various international exhibitions, including “Deliciously Disposable Earth,” an exhibition and screening series that offered a critical look at mining industries from the perspective of the arts, in 2008; the exhibitions Transfer Lounge” in 2009 and “Overlapping Memories” in 2012, which opened in Valencia, Spain, at Forja Arte Contemporáneo and Quart Jove, and in Pittsburgh, PA, at SPACE Gallery in the Cultural District. She has also done video design for theatre productions including “The Gammage Projec”t and “Dutchman,” directed by Mark Clayton Southers; “36 Views” and “Yerma” with Quantum Theatre, and a number of collaborations with Pittsburgh Musical Theatre and RMU Colonial Theatre.
As a performer, she has worked with Quantum Theatre in the productions of “The Red Shoes” (2007), “Maria de Buenos Aires” (2011), “Ainadamar” (2012), and “Mnemonic” (2013). She is also lead dancer with the ensemble Alba Flamenca, with whom she performs all through Western Pennsylvania.
In 2013 she completed the feature length documentary “Sobre las Olas,” a story of flamenco in the U.S., which had a world premiere at the 15th Havana Film Festival New York, and has been an ‘Official Selection’ at various festivals, including the 30th Chicago Latino Film festival, the Boston International Latino Film Festival, the Three Rivers Arts Festival, and the San Antonio Film Festival.
She is currently working on the multidisciplinary project “Map of Love” for the 2014 Pittsburgh Biennial, scheduled to open in September.
