Katia Maciel (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1963) is an artist, poet and full professor at the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Her practice brings together video, installation, photography, poem-objects and performance, and is organized around the particular imaginary of images in relation to landscape, objects and words.
Maciel holds a degree in History from PUC-Rio, a master's degree in Cinema and History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a doctorate in Communication from UFRJ. She has completed three postdoctoral fellowships and has published seven books of poetry, as well as theoretical works. She is the author of the concept of "transcinema," developed to address the expanded forms of contemporary cinema. She entered the visual arts through video, and since 2017, writing and visual expression have converged in her practice through performance.
Repetition is a recurring conceptual device in Maciel's work. The artist integrates written words into mirrored surfaces, perforated paper and cut vinyl, creating devices in which viewers see themselves reflected among words. In series such as Cósmicas (2024), she works with words inscribed through minute perforations in a dark surface, allowing the light of the underlying mirror to show through at discrete points. The result is a constellational form of writing, in which words emerge as points of light against an opaque background.
She has held solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2007), Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro (2018), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Cali (2015), the Museu da Imagem e do Som de São Paulo (2014), the Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires (2011), the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2014) and the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York (2022), among others. Her work has been shown in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Lithuania, Sweden and China.
Among other honors, she has received the Prêmio Honra ao Mérito Arte e Patrimônio (2013), Prêmio da Caixa Cultural Brasília (2011), the Funarte Grant for Artistic Creation in Visual Arts (2010), Rumos Itaú Cultural (2009), Prêmio Sérgio Motta (2005), Petrobras Digital Media (2003), Transmídia Itaú Cultural (2002) and Artes Visuais Rioarte (2000).
Her work is held in the collections of Gilberto Chateaubriand, Museu de Arte do Rio, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Oi Futuro Rio de Janeiro and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, as well as in important private collections.