A poet, visual artist, and filmmaker, Cecilia Vicuña exhibits and performs her work widely in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In her multidimensional, multimedia works, the limits between art and poetry, the ancestral and the avant-garde, are erased. Her precarious installations in nature and in museums evoke “an ancient silence waiting to be heard”—a silence that emerges through the interaction of language, earth, and textile. Her most recent film, Kon Kon, brilliantly explores the interconnectivity of contemporary art practices and the ancient oral traditions.

Vicuña was born in Santiago de Chile in 1948, not far from the beach at Con Con. Pinochet’s military coup in 1973 found Vicuña in London, where she stayed on, spending the remainder of the decade in exile. Since 1980, she has divided her time between New York and Chile. She is the author of eighteen poetry books, and her work has been translated into many languages. She is also an activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy in the 70′s, and recently of oysi.org, a site devoted to the oral poetries of the world. For more information on the artist and her work, please visit www.ceciliavicuna.org.