Cecilia Carvalhal is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work investigates identity as a relational and contradictory process shaped through the friction between body, space, and norm. Working across performance, wearable sculpture, and video, she approaches the body not as a stable subject but as a site where cultural forces are negotiated, inscribed, and destabilized.

Engaging traditions initiated by artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who approached the body as an epistemic site, Carvalhal extends this inquiry through wearable sculptural environments and performative embodiment. Through the construction of inhabitable wearable sculptures, she creates immersive structures that oscillate between confinement and expansion. These body-based environments function as spaces of errancy, where subjectivity is neither fully autonomous nor fully determined, but continually produced through encounter.

Her work foregrounds the productive tension between interiority and exteriority, agency and conditioning, exposing the instability of normative frameworks. Informed by intersectional feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, her research examines how patriarchal and colonial systems regulate legibility and belonging, and how the body’s “failure” to fully coincide with normative molds becomes a site of resistance and possibility. Rather than revealing a fixed identity, her performances stage moments of slippage, excess, and transformation.

Carvalhal’s work engages the camera not merely as documentation, but as a performative extension of the body — a double that participates in the production of presence and meaning.

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