Open Studio & Artists' Conversation

Join us on Friday, September 18, for an Open Studio and Artists' Conversation at El Espacio 23 featuring our current Artists in Residence.
About this Event

Join us on Friday, September 18, for an Open Studio and Artists' Conversation event at El Espacio 23 with our current CCI+WOPHA Fellow, Noa Batlle (b. Dominican Republic, lives in Santo Domingo), and WOPHA Artists in Residence, Val Souza (b. Brazil, lives in São Paulo), and Kay Zevallos Villegas (b. Peru, lives in Paris).

The work of the three artists sits at the intersection of photography and performance, with each exploring this relationship from different angles rooted in their personal inquiries and relationship with the world. Noa Batlle is interested in how urban spaces may or may not be welcoming for people with diverse abilities; Val Souza explores ideas of beauty through the Black woman's body; and Kay Zevallos juxtaposes the violence inflicted on the Amazonian woman's body and historical processes of extractivism.

This is a fantastic opportunity to meet the artists, explore their workspaces, and engage in stimulating discussions about their artistic practices and inspirations. The event will commence at 2:00 pm with a visit to the artists' studios, followed by a conversation with the artists at 3:00 pm, chaired by Charo Oquet, artist and founder of Edge Zones, a non-profit for experimental art and performance, and the Miami Performance International Festival.

Event schedule:

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm | Open studios visit

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | Artists' conversation

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm | Reception

About the CCI+WOPHA Fellow

Noa Batlle develops a research-based practice through experimentation and collaboration, examining how systems organize access, belonging, and perception. Since 2013, their work has moved between artistic research and structural interventions within public institutions. Through The Interventions (2020–present), they have contributed to rethinking accessibility in Dominican public life, including the creation of the first municipal Department of Inclusion and Accessibility and initiatives supporting the country's most inclusive electoral process in 2024. Batlle approaches accessibility not as accommodation but as a critical lens for questioning dominant sensory and social orders. Recent work includes La Ocupación / The Occupation (2026), developed with curator José Roca for the Eduardo León Jimenes Biennial, and an ongoing nationwide intervention with the Dominican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources advancing accessibility across the country's protected areas.

About the WOPHA Artists-in-Residence

Val Souza is a researcher and artist. Images, photography, and performance are fundamental to her work. She is a doctoral candidate in Visual Arts at UNESP, holds a master's degree in Dance from UFBA, and a degree in Education from Mackenzie Presbyterian University. Her artistic practice is grounded in iconographic research regarding the historical representation of Black women. Through the creation of self-portraits, her work contrasts Brazilian social imagery with notions of abundance and joy. In 2020, she received the ZUM/IMS Photography Grant. Her works are included in major collections, such as those of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, MAC USP, Instituto Moreira Salles, and MIS SP.

Kay Zevallos Villegas, known as KAY, is a Peruvian transdisciplinary artist, stage director, and researcher. Raised in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, and of Quechua heritage, Zevallos Villegas' work emerges from the oral memories, popular beliefs, legends, and rituals that shaped her childhood to examine the continuity of violence against women, vulnerable communities, and Amazonian territories, and also the postcolonial historical processes that continue to shape bodies, landscapes, and ways of life. Her practice draws on materials from the Amazon and other tropical regions—including fish scales, industrial latex, seeds, collected objects, and offerings—whose histories have been shaped by processes of extraction, circulation, exchange, and stigmatization, connected to the movement of materials, commodities, and people. She develops her artistic practice through collaborative processes with communities in the Peruvian Amazon and migrant communities. Through performance, sculpture, and other visual languages, she explores the relationships between matter, memory, territory, and ritual.

About Charo Oquet

Charo Oquet is a Dominican-born interdisciplinary artist and cultural leader whose four-decade practice spans performance, installation, photography, and film, rooted in the recovery of Afro-Dominican and Taíno ritual and spiritual traditions. In 1996 she founded what became Edge Zones, a Miami nonprofit she has directed for over two decades as a hub for experimental and performance art, and in 2012 she founded the Miami Performance International Festival, which she continues to direct today. Her work is held in important collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno (Santo Domingo), the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the World Bank, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo) and the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (Milan), and is a recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2024) and the Ellies Creator Award (2020).

About the WOPHA Artist-in-Residency program

Since its founding in 2020, the WOPHA Artist-in-Residence program has been a vital space for supporting lens-based women artists, providing a month-long opportunity to focus on creative development and connect with Miami’s dynamic cultural landscape. This program offers artists the opportunity to step away from daily demands and immerse themselves in an environment built for research, experimentation, and community engagement. It also provides opportunities for studio visits, artist presentations, classroom conversations, and exhibitions as part of the organization's initiatives.

The WOPHA Artist-in-Residence program is made possible through the support of the Pérez CreARTE Grant Program of at .