Guadalupe Maravilla

Guadalupe Maravilla was born Irvin Morazan in El Salvador. In 1984, at age eight, he came to the United States as an unaccompanied and undocumented child, fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War. He later reunited with his parents, who had immigrated several years earlier, and moved to New York City, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. In 2016, he adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla to honor the fake identity used by his father.

Today, Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist and choreographer. His work often explores immigrant culture, displacement, and the experience of migration. Diagnosed with colon cancer in his thirties, Maravilla also incorporates therapeutic practices into his art, and he considers much of his work to serve a healing function. One acclaimed series of sculptures deploys vibrational sound as a method of healing, inspired by similar “sound bath” methods used by Indigenous peoples.

“Part of the work that I’m doing is retracing my own migration route, so going back to parts of Mexico and Central America where I crossed as a child, going back to those lands as an adult, as a U.S. citizen, and confronting places that I traveled,” he told the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “I believe that untreated trauma can manifest in the body into many different types of illnesses…. This is what I make work about, and that’s how the healing work comes into play.”

Maravilla’s art has been exhibited internationally and is held in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. He has received numerous honors, including a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, and the Latinx Fellowship supported by the Ford and Mellon Foundations.

Published June 2026