Cecilia Carvalhal is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work merges performance art, wearable sculpture, and video to investigate the body as both medium and site of cultural inscription. Informed by intersectional feminist, queer, and decolonial studies, her practice examines how power inscribes itself on bodies through force, discipline, and destruction — and how bodies, in turn, can expose and resist these forces, becoming a medium for collective experience, agency, and creative identity-making.

Engaging with garments, material interventions, and embodied rituals, Carvalhal treats wearable sculptures as relational tools that blur the fragile border between inside and outside, self and other. Her practice draws on the legacy of artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Nick Cave, and Lorraine O’Grady, who have used the body as a site of transformation, resistance, and social dialogue. By staging acts of performative embodiment, she seeks to destabilize binary understandings of gender, sexuality, and race, while also opening spaces for transformation and reimagined identities.

Carvalhal has presented her work in the United States, including her thesis exhibition Between Movements (2025) at Lord Hall, where the space was transformed into a participatory studio environment. She holds a BA in Performing Arts, professional experience in the film industry as an assistant director, an MFA in Intermedia, and is currently an Interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Maine.