LEENDA BONILLA

EMERGING ARTIST

Leenda Bonilla is an interdisciplinary artist integrating visual arts with interactive performance and creative placemaking.

Born in NYC and raised in the Bronx and Puerto Rico, she balances her art practice as an arts/cultural producer and advocate. As an administrator, her work plays a pivotal role in oversight and administration of a variety of programs at various arts/cultural nonprofits. Recently as the Special Project Curatorial Consultant at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, she oversaw the collaboration with the Dept. of Transportation’s Weekend Walks program on the Grand Concourse, which revived a popular Grand Concourse tradition for the first time in 20 years of car-free Sundays of the late 80's. She introduced and/or reunited 88 civic/health agencies, art/cultural orgs and independent artists/workgroups to the Bronx community as a coalition participating in the three pedestrian Sundays in August. She attributes her new founded Coro connections from the various Coro programs as a part of her success for a well-rounded Community Change Project. She works with creative groups and organizations for projects, advisory boards and panels like the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), Pepatian, Bronx Council on the Arts, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, El Museo del Barrio, the Social Justice Artists' Collaborative, Scholastic and En Foco as examples. Her activism focuses on policies affecting new immigrant and migrant artists, cultural workers and educators with an effort to build relationships with artists, businesses and political officials to implement initiatives that will promote sustainable and creative communities. Her motto is “bridging communities with the arts”.

Ms. Bonilla graduated with a Masters in Arts/Cultural Management with distinction and merit at the Pratt Institute, and is the alumni from the most recent cohort of the Coro Leadership NYC's 2014 Immigrant Civic Leadership Program. She earned a dual BA in International Studies/Political Science at Manhattan College. Her unorthodox arts education included intensive programs at Parsons, School of Visual Arts and the International Center for Photography.

ARTIST STATEMENT

MainLAND_Mix is the creative narrative of my experiences of being Puerto Rican in New York City. It reflects the continuous morphing of multilayered forms in which mediums appear unfixed and mutable. I’m interested working in the traditional functionality of the materials- photography, found objects, graphic design, assemblage) and in subsequently breaking away from these histories to repurpose each object from its originating purpose to ultimately produce  complex and layered patterns that express tides of culture, fashion, politics, feminism and fluidity to allude to a contemporary bicultural life between the isla and the city.