Darice Polo
Biography
Darice Polo is an Associate Professor in the School of Art, where she has taught drawing and painting since 2004 and serves as the Drawing Program Coordinator. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection between personal and collective socio-political experience. Her drawings, paintings, prints and digital films have been exhibited singularly, and in dialogue with one another in a range of national and international venues.
Her short film Nature Boy was recently screened at film festivals in New York, Los Angeles and West Virginia, and is currently being shown at Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art in the exhibition Returning Home a curatorial partnership with the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center. Her film work has also been screened in the 14th A.I.R. Biennial at A.I.R. Gallery in New York and at the SEA Foundation in Tilburg, The Netherlands. She is currently producing and directing µþ°ùúÂá³Ü±ô²¹, a full-length independent film about Puerto Rico’s colonial history, the exploitation and displacement of its people, and grass roots efforts toward decolonialization.
Her essay Seeds of Colonialism: Ohio Forces in Puerto Rico was published in Intervenxions, a publication by The Latinx Project at New York University, on July 25, 2022, the anniversary of the United States invasion of Puerto Rico.
She was awarded an Equal Justice artist residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico in 2018, exhibiting and working alongside a breadth of international artists engaged in social practice. As a recipient of a Creative Workforce Fellowship, through the support of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, she created the community-based project, Seeds of Colonialism, in Cleveland’s Clark Fulton neighborhood. She is also the recipient of a Puffin Foundation Grant in direct support of her film work.
Born in New York City, she received a BFA in Media Arts from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in painting from SUNY, Albany.