Lizania Cruz

Courtesy of the artist and Proxyco

Lizania Cruz (b. 1983, Dominican Republic) is a participatory artist and designer interested in how systemic issues, mythmaking, historiography, and language shape our understanding of otherness and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience engagement, she creates projects that expand and highlight pluralistic narratives in the public sphere.

Cruz is a 2024-2025 Fellow with US Latinx Art Forum, and in 2023 she received the New York City Artadia Award. Her latest installation was commissioned by The Shed for Open Call 2023. She was part of 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Museum and ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, the first national survey of Latinx artists at El Museo del Barrio. Her work has been exhibited at Sharjah’s First Design Biennale, ICA VCU, Vancouver Art Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, Untitled Art Miami Beach, NADA Miami, The High Line, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and more. She has presented solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, CUE Art Foundation, International Studio & Curatorial Program, ISCP, Alma Lewis, and Proxyco Gallery, and has been featured in Hyperallergic, Fuse News, KQED arts, Dazed Magazine, Garage Magazine, and the New York Times. Lizania Cruz participated in LA ESCUELA___’s Residency program as part of the exhibition Education as Resistance at MoMA PS1 (2025–26).

A school without walls

LA ESCUELA___ began in 2021 with a reflection from its artistic director and co-founder, Miguel Braceli, about educational models for social practices and situated learning. This idea of bringing art and education closer to social realities by taking them out into public space became the building block of a project co-developed with the international foundation Siemens Stiftung. From this vision, LA ESCUELA___ was conceived as a “school without walls.”

Rather than operating from a fixed campus or following a predetermined curriculum, this artist-run platform works through a growing hemispheric network of artists, architects, educators, researchers, organizers, independent spaces, and communities. Its projects take shape in different contexts across the Americas, responding to local conditions while creating connections between places and practices.

Since 2022, LA ESCUELA___ has developed more than 45 projects in 13 countries, engaging more than 6,000 participants in online and on-site programs, and collaborating with over 350 artists and thinkers. Its programs include on-site experimental classrooms and online labs, residencies, public art, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, symposia, and research processes. An open-access Library with over 300 essays, interviews, documentation, and pedagogical resources expands this work into a growing alternative critical pensum of Latin American artistic and pedagogical practices.

At the heart of the platform is a commitment to reciprocal exchange: not exporting a model from one place to another, but creating conditions for different forms of knowledge to meet, circulate, and transform one another.