Mia Eve Rollow is a nomadic artist whose interdisciplinary practice intervenes in disabling systems of power through site-specific performance, sculpture, moving image, murals, and public intervention. Her work cultivates terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance, often emerging through sustained collaboration with communities confronting displacement, state violence, and intersecting forms of oppression.

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Rooted in intersectional and collaborative methodologies, her practice considers how political borders, institutional structures, and systems of disenfranchisement govern movement—of bodies, ideas, histories, and forms of knowledge. Through ritual, absurdity, consultation, and public performance, she explores how gestures ideas and forms can travel when certain bodies cannot.  Rollow brings dreams from distant places into relation without asking them to become the same, searching for forms of solidarity that can hold difference rather than resolve it.

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Influenced by ancient futurism and magical realism, Rollow’s work inhabits a spiral of time, where the ancestral and the not-yet-imagined continually fold into the present. The material and the mythic cross into one another: everyday objects become ritual objects, bodies become political territories, and familiar landscapes slip toward other possible realities.

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Living with paraplegia since 2007, Rollow approaches disability not simply as a condition of the body, but as a way of perceiving how power operates through movement, architecture, access, dependency, and care. Her body—marked by injury, adaptation and refusal—functions as both witness and agent, foregrounding who is granted access to space, resources, movement, and voice.

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This embodied perspective extends into a nomadic global practice. Rollow has co-created projects within Mexico, Turtle Island, Chile, Palestine, Cuba, Senegal, India, Morocco, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and beyond, working with land-back movements, laborers, asylum seekers, and others confronting intersecting forms of oppression. Rather than arriving with predetermined forms, she works through sustained exchange, allowing shared experience, research, ritual, and experimentation to determine what a work becomes. These collaborations have taken the form of performances, films, murals, sculptures, workshops, temporary architectures, and interventions in public space.

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In 2009, Rollow co-founded EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU / Where the United Nations Used to Be) with artist Caleb Duarte in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, repurposing a former United Nations building into an artist-run residency, cultural center, experimental laboratory, and safe house. The project developed in dialogue with displaced Indigenous communities and Zapatista practices of autonomy. Since 2014, EDELO has continued as EDELO Migrante, a nomadic platform for collaborative performance, sculpture, workshops, and public interventions across shifting communities and political contexts internationally. This experience continues to shape Rollow’s understanding of art not simply as representation, but as a means of gathering, exchanging knowledge, disrupting dominant narratives, and rehearsing other political realities.

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Rollow’s work was recently the subject of a survey exhibition with Caleb Duarte at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Recent and ongoing projects include Embassy of the Refugee with Monument Lab in San Francisco and Ocean Oracle, developed through a two-year art-and-science collaboration with UC Santa Cruz confronting ecological collapse through whale research and interspecies knowledge. Her work and collaborative projects have been presented internationally at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Paço das Artes, São Paulo; Casa de las Américas, Havana; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal; as well as in autonomous Zapatista territories in Chiapas, Deheisha Refugee Camp in Palestine, migrant shelters along the Mexico–Guatemala border, Mapuche territory in Chile, and public spaces and community sites internationally.

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Her practice has been featured in The Art of Accompaniment: Visualizing Displacement in the Americas (Duke University Press, forthcoming), Zapantera Negra, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Barbarie: Pensar con Otros, and Momus. Rollow received her MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.