Renowned artist/photographer Cara Romero will give a career-spanning talk about the making of a contemporary Native American artist — from her training at the Institute of American Indian Arts to founding the Cara Romero Gallery and Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Her lecture is the second of the 2026-27 Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment (VASE) series.
Romero is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. Her work — held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA — moves fluidly between fine art, documentary and cinematic staged photography, grounded in Chemehuevi epistemology, traditional ecological knowledge, and Indigenous futurism.
Romero’s identity informs her photography, a blend of fine art and editorial photography, shaped by years of study and a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective.
