About
Elyla is a multidisciplinary artist from Chontales, Nicaragua. Working across performance, moving image, installation, and ritual practice, their work explores the relationships between memory, spirituality, territory, and queer forms of belonging.
Rooted in Mesoamerica, Elyla's practice draws from oral histories, communal traditions, and long-term engagement with living cultural and spiritual practices. Through research and collaboration, they work with ceremony, storytelling, and embodied forms of knowledge as ways of understanding how histories are carried across generations and how relationships between people, land, and the more-than-human world are continually shaped. Their work is further informed by barro-mestiza and corpodivinidades, frameworks they have developed through their artistic practice.
Moving between historical research and lived experience, they examine the ways in which Central American cultural traditions, festivals, carnivals, and communal forms of knowledge continue to sustain everyday life in the present.
BIO
Elyla (b. 1989) lives and works between Nicaragua and Basel, Switzerland. Recent presentations include Corpodivinidades (2025), a survey exhibition spanning more than a decade of their work at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, curated by Miguel A. López. Elyla has participated in major international exhibitions and biennials, including the Biennale di Venezia (2024), Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), Bienal de Arte Páiz Guatemala (2025), XII Bienal de La Habana, the IX and X Central American Biennials, and the IX and X Nicaraguan Biennials. Their work is held in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21); Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection (CIFO); Ortiz-Gurdián Collection; KADIST; and MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Their work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, performances, screenings, and research platforms, including the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University.
They are a recipient of the Artist Protection Fund Fellowship administered by the Institute of International Education (IIE), the Prince Claus Fund Seed Award, and the Moving Narratives Fellowship. In 2026, they were selected as an artist-in-residence at Art Explora × Cité internationale des arts, Paris.