My practice explores the social and political complexity of race, representation, identity, and the collective community.

Elia Alba was born in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States in the 1950s. She is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice is concerned with the social and political complexity of race, representation, identity, and the collective community.

Alba received a BA from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited at museums internationally, including The Studio Museum in Harlem; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Science Museum, London; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; El Museo del Barrio, New York; ITAU Cultural Institute, São Paulo; Matadero Madrid, National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid and the 10th Havana Biennial. Her work has been collected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Alba’s work has been reviewed by Forbes, Artforum, ArtNews, and Cultured Magazine, among other publications. Her critically acclaimed book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (Hirmer, 2019) brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food, and dialogue to examine race and culture in the US. She is artist-in-residence at the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx and guest curator of El Museo del Barrio’s current exhibition Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21.

Selected Works