Patrícia Colmenero is a storyteller who thrives in the in-between—between places, disciplines, and ways of knowing. Like Cladosporium sphaerospermum, the black fungus that transforms radiation into energy, she metabolizes history, trauma, and displacement into art, scholarship, and cinema. Her work blurs the lines between theory and storytelling, weaving archival hauntings with lived experience—like a footnote that dreams or a film frame that remembers.

Patrícia Colmenero is a Brazilian writer, filmmaker, and visual artist based in New York City. She holds a PhD and an MFA and creates research-driven work across painting, experimental cinema, and literature. Her projects center women’s experiences and self-representation, alongside migration, land-based memory, and the afterlives of colonial representation.

In 2026, Colmenero was selected for the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, and she is an AAUW International Fellow (2023–2024). Her painting work from the Counter-Ethnographies project will be featured in In/Between at New York Live Arts in April 2026. Her documentary on immigration, You Are Invited to Leave, won Best Documentary at the 2025 CUNY Film Festival. Her first feature, Pool Blue (Moveo Filmes), received a grant from Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, and it is currently in post-production.

Her experimental film work extends these concerns through land-based cinema and performance. There Were Sirens in Cerrado has screened internationally, including at the Beirut International Women Film Festival and other venues across the globe, and Colmenero also performs in the work, bringing the body into direct relation with landscape, voice, and memory.

Her work also extends to publishing: she is the founder, writer, and editor of NIL, a nationally distributed print magazine about arts and culture supported by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture (2011-2012). Her novel Because Till Death I Will Hunger was published in Portuguese (2012), and its English translation is currently in query.

Photo credit: Lee Rayment