M I A E V E
Mia is a nomadic artist whose interdisciplinary practice intervenes in disabling systems of power through site-specific performance, murals, video, and sculptural installation. Her work cultivates terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance, often created in direct collaboration with communities affected by state violence, displacement, and systemic oppression.
Rooted in intersectional and collaborative methodologies, her practice considers how disenfranchisement, political borders, and institutional structures restrict movement—of people, ideas, and histories. Through ritual, consultation, and public performance, she explores how gestures and forms can travel when certain bodies cannot.
Influenced by ancient futurism and magical realism, Mia’s work operates between timelines—evoking ancestral knowledge while imagining speculative, liberatory futures. Her projects often blend the material with the mythic, transforming trauma into ritual, isolation into communion, and fear into myth.
Mia has co-created projects across Mexico, Chile, Palestine, Cuba, Senegal, and beyond, working with land-back movements, laborers, asylum seekers, and others confronting intersecting forms of oppression. These collaborations result in public artworks that engage with shared struggles around mobility, autonomy, and collective memory. Informed by her lived experience with paraplegia, Mia approaches disability not as limitation but as a portal—positioning the body as both witness and agent of resistance.
Influenced by socially engaged art and grassroots movements such as the Zapatistas, her work proposes aesthetic strategies for survival and solidarity in an era of ecological crisis and state-sanctioned violence. She sees art as a vital space for consciousness-raising, mutual aid, and imagining new political futures.
I was immersed in this form of ongoing, creative reconceptualization of political institutions and world systems while collaborating on a five-year project with artist Caleb Duarte in Chiapas, Mexico. We transformed a building formerly occupied by the United Nations into a cultural center and safe house called EDELO, where artists and activists from around the world could collaborate with rural communities to explore ways to use art as a form of collective resistance and direct action. While my approach starts simply—I spend time within a community, conducting research, sharing daily experiences, and working together—each partnership takes its own shape, producing something unique and site-specific.
Once inhabiting the building of the former UN, EDELO Migrante is now, since 2014, nomadic collectives creating works with diverse communities around the world. Performances and public interventions are created with asylum seekers, freedom fighters, and others, using principles of reciprocity and care to build a repertoire of ancestral knowledge and creative expressions rooted in lived experience and collective wisdom.
Rollow’s work has been featured most recently in a survey exhibition at UC Santa Cruz. It's been also shown in The Red Cat Gallery, New York; Casa de Americas, Cuba; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Canada; Paco das Artes, Brazil; Reina Sofia Museum, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Wien Museum, Vienna; Contemporary Art Space, Uruguay; and Museo de Moneda, Chile.
Their practice has featured in books, including The Art of Accompaniment: Visualizing Displacement in the Americas (Upcoming, Duke UP) and Zapentera Negra, as well as journals including Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Barbarie Pensar Con Otros, and Momus. She is currently an artist-in-resident at UCSC. Rollow received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Selected Exhibitions & Projects
1. EDELO: Where the United Nations Used to Be
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México (2009–2014)
Co-founded by Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, EDELO (Where the United Nations Used to Be) was an experimental art space established in a former UN office building occupied by displaced Indigenous communities. Functioning as an intercultural residency, community center, and performance laboratory, EDELO explored art as a form of social sculpture rooted in Zapatista aesthetics and decolonial practice. Through residencies, public interventions, and sculptural performances, the project positioned art as a tool for autonomy, collective memory, and radical imagination.
2. Burial (Entierro)
Chiapas, Mexico (2011–ongoing)
EDELO Collaborative, Elambo Bajo, Autonomous Zapatista Territory
Ongoing community residencies, performances, and festivals addressing the genocidal history against Maya populations in Guatemala and Mexico and their resistance. Burial uses the metaphor of planting a seed that will grow into a fruit-bearing tree—a ritual action that challenges colonial frameworks and centers earth-based cosmologies and ancestral memory as tools for embodied knowledge.
3. Padre No Me Pegues / Father Don’t Hit Me
Chiapas, Mexico (2013)
EDELO Collaborative with actresses Dalia Perez and Adriana Tomy Santiz (Mayan Chamula community)
Month-long workshops and performances confronting gender-based violence, resilience, and objectification. Through surreal, symbolic actions, the project critiques patriarchy and commodification while fostering critical audience engagement with femicide and survival.
4. Zapantera Negra
International (2012–ongoing)
Transnational collaboration spanning Chiapas, Mexico; São Paulo, Brazil; Madrid, Spain; Vienna, Austria; Havana, Cuba; Mexico City; BioBio, Chile; Montréal, Canada, and beyond.
In collaboration with Emory Douglas, Rigo 23, EDELO, Zapatista and international artists, this decade-long project bridges the visual and political languages of the Zapatista movement and the Black Panther Party. Utilizing large-scale embroidery, murals, archival materials, and public performances, it investigates revolutionary aesthetics as tools for resistance and cultural survival.
5. Ayotzinapa
Guerrero, Mexico (2014)
EDELO Collaborative with Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College
One-month residency involving performative protest mural interventions responding to the forced disappearance of 43 students. Collaborated with students, families, activists, and artists to transform seized official vehicles into sites of resistance through sustained collective artistic action.
6. Embassy of the Refugee
Chiapas, Mexico (2014); Tijuana, Mexico (2021); Frankfurt, Germany (2021)
EDELO Collaborative with refugee communities and asylum seekers
A series of nomadic installations, performances, and artist-ambassador programs addressing displacement, statelessness, and sanctuary.
In Chiapas and Tijuana, the project engaged Central American, Haitian, and South American refugees along the migration routes of La Bestia train to the US–Mexico border. In Frankfurt’s Metzlerpark, in collaboration with Syrian and Iranian asylum seekers, it evolved into a collaborative, interactive, and temporary sculpture that, as a pseudo-state institution, symbolically creates an autonomous space of refuge and creativity.
7. We Are Worthy of Life
Deheisha Refugee Camp, West Bank, Palestine (2019)
EDELO Collaborative
A three-month residency resulted in a short film created in partnership with residents of Deheisha Refugee Camp who became disabled through violence experienced in prison. The work explores the occupation, inherited resistance, and embodied memory, using storytelling, performance, and ritual to accompany and amplify collective steadfastness.
8. Chi Kawelle Peib
Mapuche Territory, BioBio Region, Chile (2024)
EDELO Collaborative
Five-month mural residency addressing Indigenous resistance amid regional political tensions. The project responds to the assassination of three police officers staged beside a mural of a ceremonial Mapuche horse. Community graffiti “Chi Kawelle Peib” (“The Horse is Witness”) asserts underground Indigenous testimony in the face of increasing militarization.
9. Weather and the Whale: Moonlight Oracle
Institute of the Arts and Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz (2025)
An interdisciplinary installation developed over a two-year collaboration with whale ecologists, commissioned for the exhibition Weather and the Whale. This immersive film-based work weaves together sculpture, sound, and ritual performance to respond to planetary crisis and political unrest. Rooted in interspecies knowledge and ancestral cosmologies, the project engages ecological justice as both an aesthetic and embodied practice.
10. Dreams Being Real: EDELO’s Frontline Resistance
Visualizing Abolition, University of California, Santa Cruz (2025)
EDELO’s inaugural retrospective exhibition explores body, land, and dream as contested sites of political and cultural resistance. The survey situates the artists’ years in Chiapas and their subsequent nomadic practice with dispossessed communities.
Through videos, site-specific sculptures, textiles, and a monumental earthen work created with formerly incarcerated and undocumented collaborators in California, the exhibition connects struggles across regions and contexts. The works—often produced with asylum seekers, land-back movements, and communities resisting state violence—develop an aesthetic language of liberation that transgresses political, ideological, and physical borders.
