Rodrigo Valenzuela

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.1982, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is an Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. 

Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela's photography, video and installation work is rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, at the same time, these pursuits are equally centered on a semiotic, politically engaged post-capitalist critique of social constructs and civic institutions.

Rodrigo Valenzuela’s photographic assemblages are often evocative of the kind of transitional spaces in modern living associated with building construction, urban decline and civil disobedience. These built environments, already a simulacrum of reality, are further complicated by his technique of using his own photographic work as backdrops against which additional installations are seamlessly built and rephotographed. In this way a complex sense of spatial displacement is created. Taken as a whole his work makes poetic use of the liminal spaces that modern living so often places us within, locations that are always on the threshold of being built or sliding into decline. Valenzuela speaks of travelling across the US by car and paying witness to the parts of the landcape that we look away from, the discarded parts of the American Dream that line the roadside mile after mile.

Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2025 Foundation of Contemporary Art/ Richard Pousette-Dart award. 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Award, Art Matters Foundation Grant, and the Artist Trust Innovators Award. Recent solo exhibitions include The Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; BRIC Arts Media, NY; Screen Series at the New Museum, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Orange County Museum, Santa Ana, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. 

Recent residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, Dora Maar Fellowship, Ménerbes, France; Fountainhead Residency, Miami FL; Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Lightwork, Syracuse, NY, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.