Full bio (C.V. here)

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. Across media, Damasceno’s work is concerned with the ways archives live in bodies, objects, landscapes, and gestures, and with how artistic practice can open space for histories that exceed official representation.

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She began working in film as an assistant producer at Caliban Produções in Rio de Janeiro, a company dedicated to documentary filmmaking, where she worked from 2001 to 2007. During that time, she also served as an editor and assistant director on several Caliban productions, including Memory and History, which received 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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In 2007, Damasceno began her independent and freelance practice, collaborating with nonprofits and leading creative workshops for underserved youth in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where she founded the St. Anthony Cinema Society (SCISA). Through her project Homo Kinema, she guided young people in researching elders’ memories of traditional movie theaters while also producing and directing documentaries connected to this theme in Tijuana, Mexico, and Greensboro, North Carolina. Across these projects, she developed a practice grounded in local participation, public screenings, and collective cultural engagement.

From 2001 to 2012, Damasceno worked in Brazil, Germany, France, Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States as a director, project designer, grant writer, researcher, producer, videographer, video editor, and instructor. Her works have been shown at venues including MoMA, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Docstown International Documentary Film Festival, and the Echo Park Film Center.

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She also holds an MSLS in Digital Archives from UNC Chapel Hill and a BFA in Photography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 2024, her MFA thesis, An Island for an Exiled, was exhibited at Gatewood Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina. That same year, she presented a solo exhibition at the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and participated in the group exhibition Dirty Abstractions at Union Hall in Denver, Colorado. In 2025, she participated in Destierro at The LookOut Gallery at Michigan State University.

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Her honors include the D’Art Gallery Conceptual Photography Exhibition Award (2023), the Hariban Juror’s Choice Award (2020), and the Silver Fine Art Award from the Budapest International Foto Awards (2020). She has participated in artist residencies at Light Work (2022), Elsewhere Living Museum (2012), and La Casa del Túnel in Mexico (2010). Her work has also been exhibited at Greensboro Project Space, the Weatherspoon Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Southeastern Center for Photography, and is held in the collections of Light Work and the Southeastern Center for Photography.