Jennifer Teresa Villanueva is a Mexican American artist born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, whose practice examines memory, migration, and the emotional residue of immigrant life in the United States. The daughter of Mexican immigrant factory workers, her understanding of home has been shaped by labor, sacrifice, and interdependence, which continue to force the anchor in her work. Through photography, silkscreen, and cyanotype, she constructs materially layered images that mirror the complexity of family history, where personal memory and public systems converge.
Her long-term project, ¿Quieres Salvar Al Mundo? Empieza por tu Familia / Do You Want to Save the World? Start with Your Family, documents her family’s daily negotiations of work, illness, care, and belonging. Working in vibrant color, intimate environmental portraits, and still lifes, Villanueva approaches documentary practice as a relational and collaborative process. Her silkscreens layer family photographs with U.S. immigration documents, underscoring how private lives are shaped by bureaucratic structures, while her cyanotypes evoke the fragility and erosion of place across borders. Across these processes, she treats the image as both elegy and evidence, sedimented, unstable, and deeply human.
Villanueva holds a BFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2020) and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2023). She was a 2025 AIM Fellow at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and has participated in the SOMA Summer program in Mexico City and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program as an Elaine G. Weitzen Fellow. She has received awards from En Foco, Aperture Creator Labs, the Rauschenberg Artist Fund, and the Chicago Artist Coalition.
Portrait by Argenis Apolinario