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Graduate Studies Division
Art Department
Dr.
Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA
Graduate
UC Santa Cruz Westside Research Park
EASP Art Studios
Art Department
Sarmiento is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and scholar. They are an MFA candidate in the Environmental Art and Social Practice program at UCSC, and work with the tools of film, performance, sculpture, drawing and in general seeking out socio-spatial practices anchored in questions of land-based knowledges and cosmologies. Anchored in alluvial and liquid forms of resistance, fugitivity and solidarity, in latinx hauntologies and migrations, their work nurtures cross-species intimacies and solidarities that blur the lines between human and more than human, unsettling dominant colonial binaries, borders, taxonomic grammers and forms of enclosure. They hold a PhD in Visual and Performing Art from the Durban University of Technology, an MA in Peace and Conflict from the Oslo International Peace Research Institute and Stellenbosch University, and a BA in Studio Art and International Relations from the University of Miami.
2025 University of California, Santa Cruz, Norris Center Art and Science Fellowship
2025 University of California, Santa Cruz, Irwin Project Grant
2025 University of California, Santa Cruz, The Humanities Institute Moving Image Lab Public Fellow (Winter Quarter of 2026)
2025 University of California Santa Cruz, Summer Support Research Fellowship
2025 University of California Santa Cruz, Arts Research Institute for an Equity and Innovation Grant
2025 University of California, Santa Cruz, Irwin Project Grant
2025 University of California, Santa Cruz, Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Research Fellowship, The Humanities Institute (THI)
2024 University of California, Santa Cruz, Arts Dean's Fund for Excellence and Equity
2020 University of Cape Town, Institute of Create Arts, Writing fellowship
2015-2016 University of Cape Town, Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts, Research & Creative Development Grant
2014 University of Cape Town, African Studies, Research Grant
2013 University of Cape Town, Harry Oppenheimer Institute, Research Grant
2012 Truth is Concrete/Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria, Grant Recipient
2010-2011 Brown University, Trilateral Reconnections Project, Graduate Research Fellowship
2011 Brown University International Advanced Research Institute, Alumnus
2011-2014 University of Cape Town, Postgraduate University Research Scholarship
2009 Uppsala University, Nordiska Afrika Institutt, Research travel grant
2024 ‘Archives of the Botanical’, collaborative performance and curated food and film intervention, KwaZulu Natal Society of the Arts (KZNSA) Gallery and Durban Botanical Gardens
2013 ‘Land and Erasure I and II’ Collaborative performances and curatorial interventions
2012 ‘The Callings’ site-specific performance/memory walks and curatorial intervention in public art festival The Exuberance Project
2022 Presentation at Archives of the Planetary Mine Symposium, December 2022, Stockholm University & the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies https://www.su.se/nordic-institute-of-latin-american-studies/calendar/archives-of-the-planetary-mine-culture-nature-extraction-and-energy-across-the-americas-1.622642
2013 ‘Public space, festivalisation and contested cultural expression’ presentation at Thinking the City, Public Symposium connected to Public Art Festival Infecting the City.
2025-2026 ‘Of plants and sediment: entangled disruptions in Jumana Manna and Haroon Gunn-Salie’, forthcoming chapter in special issue of Geoforum, edited by Gianfranco Selgas and Henrik Ernstson
2025 ‘Haroon Gunn-Salie’s Cartographies of Refusal’, in Restless Infections: Public Art and a Transforming City edited by Jay Pather, NYU Press and Wits University Press, May 2025, https://nyupress.org/9781776149483/restless-infections/
2025 Doctoral Dissertation in Visual and Performing Art, ‘Of Art and Ecology: Towards Methodologies of Care’, Durban University of Technology
2024 ‘The Blue House’ exhibition text for Alka Dass solo exhibition at Whatiftheworld gallery, Cape Town, https://www.whatiftheworld.com/exhibition/the-blue-house/
2022 Chapter with Thuto Thipe and Natasha Himmelman, in Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love: A Gedenkschrift for Harry Garuba, edited by Remi Raji, Natasha Himmelman, Josephine Alexander, Niyi Okunoye, Idowu Omoyele, Bongani Kona, Ibadan, Kraftbooks.
2020 ‘A tribute to poet and professor Harry Garuba: We Continue To Learn With You’ in Conversation, March 2020, https://theconversation.com/a-tribute-to-poet-and-professor-harry-garuba-we-continue-to-learn-with-you-134065
2015 ‘On burial grounds and city spaces – reconfiguring the normative’ in After Ethics: Ancestral Voices and Post-disciplinary Worlds in Archaeology, edited by Nick Shepherd and Alejandro Haber, Springer
2013 ‘Graveyards, monuments and African Studies’ in Chimurenga Chronic, http://chimurengachronic.co.za/graveyards-monuments-and-african-studies/
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