bio

Paula Damasceno is a transdisciplinary artist and professor of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her practice weaves together photography, performance, installation, and film through an initiation poetics in which knowing and not knowing, opacity and refusal become generative forces. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she specialized in multimedia and transdisciplinary space-making. Engaging material legacies such as tintypes, ritual objects, embodied gestures, and moving images, her work creates speculative grounds for memory, exile, and new territories in confluence across disciplines and histories.

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Her films—documentary, short fiction, and experimental—center memory as a living archive, braiding local stories with community records and speculative fabulation to surface what the official record withholds. She began her career in film at Caliban Produções in Rio de Janeiro, where she worked from 2001 to 2007 as an assistant producer and later as an editor and assistant director on documentary productions, including Memory and History, an award-winning film recognized by the Margarida de Prata Award (CNBB), a Special Jury Prize at the Jornada Internacional de Cinema da Bahia, and Best Video at the Curitiba Film Festival.

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Since 2007, Damasceno has developed an independent practice rooted in community engagement, public memory, and cultural research. In Salvador, Bahia, she founded the St. Anthony Cinema Society (SCISA) and led creative workshops for underserved youth. Through her project Homo Kinema, she collaborated with young people in researching elders’ memories of traditional movie theaters while producing and directing related documentaries in Tijuana, Mexico, and Greensboro, North Carolina.

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She also holds an MSLS in Digital Archives from UNC Chapel Hill and a BFA in Photography from UNC Greensboro. In 2024, her MFA thesis, An Island for an Exiled, was exhibited at Gatewood Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina. That same year, she had a solo exhibition at the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill and participated in Dirty Abstractions at Union Hall in Denver. In 2025, she participated in Destierro at The LookOut Gallery at Michigan State University. Her honors include the D’Art Gallery Conceptual Photography Exhibition Award, the Hariban Juror’s Choice Award, and the Silver Fine Art Award from the Budapest International Foto Awards.