Kathy Murillo is a queer Venezuelan Caribbean-rooted artist, researcher, and cultural producer based in the Netherlands. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, archival material, and participatory and knowledge-sharing practices, Kathy Murillo investigates how personal, political, and historical narratives are constructed, circulated, and given meaning. Graduated from Fine Arts at Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam University, 2023, honours) and followed an Erasmus exchange at Central Saint Martins in London and currently in the final year of the Master Fine Arts at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, her research is informed by intersectional feminist and decolonial thought, while examining the historical and contemporary entanglements between the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
Beginning from her own lived experience, memory, migration, spirituality, and belonging, Kathy Murillo methodology moves between investigation and intuition. She collects and recontextualises archival images, historical documents, popular culture, objects, testimonies, sound, and personal material, allowing different histories and forms of knowledge to encounter one another. Her practice questions structures of power and representation: who produces narratives, whose perspective becomes authoritative, what is preserved, and what is rendered invisible. Her research also traces her shifting sense of belonging through the connections, distances, and tensions between the Netherlands and Venezuela.
Kathy Murillo is the founder of KindleArt, an ongoing artistic and educational initiative connecting young people with contemporary art through dialogue, collective making, and imagination. Kathy Murillo work has been featured in FAD Magazine, Financial Times, El Heraldo Mexico, and other international publications, and presented in contexts including Hoogtij Den Haag (WestEnd) and the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam. Influenced by thinkers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, and Katherine McKittrick, Kathy Murillo continues to develop a transnational practice not only concerned with Venezuela, the Caribbean, displacement, collective memory, spirituality, justice and in-betweenness but also with the ways power shapes how places, histories, and people are represented and understood.