I combine digital art-making and photography with discarded architectural and natural elements to explore a range of media, including time-based work, painting, sculpture, and installation. Video art is often my point of entry. I find myself intuitively documenting moments that draw my attention, later discovering connections in the editing process. This observation-reflection loop creates dialogues around subjects I care deeply about.
When working with stills and video, I rearrange, splice, superimpose, or alter images in post-production. I favor printing on aluminum or fusing images to glass, acrylic, or transparency film. Layering, collaging, and preserving translucency are central to my visual language. I often incorporate found objects into installations—elements that reflect and mirror imagery across surfaces, creating an interplay between image, sound, and spatial abstraction.
Recently, I’ve begun integrating traditional sculptural materials, moving from site-specific installations to a more controlled studio practice. I’ve also been engaging with oral histories through the lens of magical realism to craft immersive, narrative-driven experiences.
As a trained filmmaker and multimedia designer, storytelling grounds everything I make—from fragile, ephemeral structures to defined sculptural forms. I create fragmented narratives within temporal spaces, where themes of human ecology, eco-social engagement, ecofeminism, climate change, systems restoration, and the natural-built environment emerge. I approach my practice as an ethnographic observer—an outlook that also shapes my curatorial work and public activations.
I also produce a podcast as part of my broader artistic practice. Oral Fixation Art Podcast, Is A PILOT project documenting the lives and art practices of artists.
I live and work in Chicago.
In art, everything is particular. The more particular and the more intimate you get, the more you can give in the piece.
- Doris Salcedo
BIO: Pia Cruzalegui (b. Peru) is an interdisciplinary artist working with digital media, installation and curatorial practices. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Video, Film and Multimedia from Florida Atlantic University. She has shown her works and curated exhibitions in the US and abroad. Some notable acknowledgements include a 2019 award from the Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio in Ecuador, for her work, Rojo Rosa Rosado, and the commissioned video documentation project, American Tales in the Making, funded by the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read, now archived at the Freeport Art Museum, in Illinois. Pia is the producer and host of the Oral Fixation Art Podcast, and is a foundations teaching artist at college of dupage.