ELIZABETH CEREJIDO - BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Cerejido was born in Havana, Cuba in 1969 and raised in Miami, FL. She is an artist and an art historian, who specializes in Contemporary Latin American art and photography, with a special focus in Cuban art. As curator at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University she has organized and curated the following projects: Vision Revealed: Selections from the work of Abelardo Morell; Lespri Endepandan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture; Mexterminator vs. Global Predator – A Solo Performance by Guillermo Gómez Peña; Rubén Torres Llorca: Modelo Para Armar / Easy-to-Build and A Room of One’s Own: Teresita Fernández, María Elena González, Quisqueya Henríquez, and María Martínez-Cañas (featuring the conceptual work of four women installation artists and Cintas Foundation Fellows).
As an independent curator she organized the exhibition titled The Parallax Effect at El Centro Cultural Español in 2003 - featuring the work of 6 Cuban and Cuban-American photographers – living and working on either side of the Florida Straits. As visual arts consultant and guest curator for the Cuban Research Institute (CRI) at Florida International University, Ms. Cerejido has produced and curated projects for a series titled Cultura al Borde, funded by the Ford Foundation. The series aims to expose the South Florida student and community-at-large audiences to the work of Cuban artists, thus creating a public forum through which an exchange can take place about the realities of creating and producing artwork within the specific socio-political context of Cuba. The series, which has focused on performance art, has included the work of Tania Bruguera, El Soca & Fabian (former members of ENEMA), and Juan-Sí González.
As an artist, Cerejido works in photography, and most recently in video and sound. Drawn from her own personal history, she addresses issues of identity, memory and the construct of family. Absence, 2002 and Re-constructing a Family Portrait, 2004 are two solo exhibitions that represent an important marker in her artistic career, as they are conceptual in nature and depart heavily from the early, figurative black and white work. She is represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs, such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Palm Beach Photography and Bologne Art Fair. She has exhibited in New York at the Throckmorton Gallery and Schneider Gallery in Chicago. In addition, she has had numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions which include Galeria Pancho Fierro en la Municipalidad Metropolitana Centro Cultural, Lima, Peru;, Italy; Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, PA.; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL., among others. In 2000, Elizabeth was one of the recipients of the prestigious Florida Consortium for Visual and Media Artists Fellowship in 2000. Her work is part of numerous museum collections including MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), North Miami, FL.; MAM (Miami Art Museum), Miami, FL.; Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, PA.; and Centro de las Artes Visuales, Lima Peru.