Darice Polo is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection between the personal and collective history of the Puerto Rican people. 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 in the exhibition Returning Home at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland in curatorial partnership with the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center. She is currently producing and directing Brújula, 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.
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. She has lived and worked in Cleveland, Ohio and has been a professor in the School of Art at Kent State University since 2004.