ABOUT MY WORK
Lily Rodriguez is a Queer Cuban-born artist based in Los Angeles, California. Much of her work engages queer and Latinx identity, often in the context of memory and forgetting, migration and exile, and re-imagined practices of home and community. In 1998 Rodriguez returned to Cuba for the first time since her early childhood, and the experience was revelatory. During this return she began to make sense of the memories she had constructed from second hand stories and old photographs from Cuba. The findings and visceral responses are recorded in the form of photographs in the Cuba portfolio, exhibited in photographs, installation and film. During her return to Cuba, Rodriguez found herself utterly overwhelmed by the quality of light and by the way the sun saturated every surface, and she began, for the first time in years of practice, to work with color film. As if color was entirely new to her senses, or returned to her by some alchemy of place and memory. A vivid and unique use of color remains a hallmark of her practice.
Rodriguez graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology & Sociology and worked with LGBTQIA+ adolescents and runaway/homeless street youth as counselor, interviewer, and HIV/AIDS researcher. In 1996 Rodriguez returned to photography full time and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, studying primarily with Reagan Louie, Ann Chamberlain, Linda Connor, Henry Wessel, and Susan Schwartzenberg. After completing her MFA, Rodriguez worked as a photographer and artist at the Exploratorium, an internationally recognized premier art, science and human perception museum in San Francisco and traveled as a freelance photojournalist for Oxfam America.
Rodriguez has received several awards, among them: The Photo Review International Photography Award, En Foco New Works Award, Artlink Sotheby’s International Youth Art and the Gordon Parks Photography Award. Rodriguez’s photography has been featured in various publications such as The Photo Review, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Where San Francisco Magazine, numerous Oxfam America and Exploratorium publications and public works, and Lehigh University’s Viajeros: North American Artist/Photographers Images of Cuba. Rodriguez collaborated and co-curated the Photographer’s in Film Series with Liz Keim; a film series, installation, and panel discussion for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, as well as presented her photographic work in conjunction with AB Huber’s presentation featuring photographs from the Cuba portfolio/ ”One of You Forever” at the University of British Columbia symposium/The Fading Image: Visual Culture and the Transformation of Memory. Rodriguez has exhibited work nationally through multiple venues both traditional and experimental, among them Lehigh University Art Galleries/Bethlehem Penn, Restoration Skylight Gallery/Brooklyn NY, Galeria De La Raza/San Francisco CA, Southern Exposure Gallery/San Francisco CA, Remote Lounge/NYC, Diego Rivera Gallery/San Francisco CA, Walter McBean Gallery/San Francisco CA, Woman Made Gallery/Chicago Illinois and the Exploratorium/San Francisco CA. Most recently Rodriguez has been engaged and inspired by her collaboration with Guggenheim Fellowship and Mellon Foundation recipient, Dr. Kaja Silverman. Rodriguez currently lives and works in Los Angeles as a photo-based artist and after earning her Master of Science degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and School Counseling in the Department of Education at California State University, Northridge, she serves as a psychotherapist at California Institute of the Arts.
