Star Feliz

Star Feliz (b. 1992, Lenapehoking, New York, NY) is an artist and healer living and working on Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA). Feliz illuminates the processes of world-building as they braid back together the strands of life within their Afro-Taino lineage of the Caribbean and its diaspora that were so violently fragmented since the onset of European colonization. Working across media, their conceptual installations take the form of maps, songs, dimensions, and talismans. Through the exploration of the twinned histories of humanity and the earth, a unique visual lexicon emerges that embraces the mundane and the unknowable as sacred. Often functioning as wayfinding tools, these interventions bring an inter-dimensional perspective to the forefront and make manifest the transcendent possibilities between the scientific, the intuitive, and the fantastical. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music with the earth through intimate narratives of transformation.  

Feliz’ artistic practice develops in tandem with their healing practice within movements for radical change. After more than ten years of intensive study and community practice, they currently steward their ancestral Indigenous knowledge-ways under the independently-run project of Botánica Cimarrón. Born of Afro-Taino traditions of the Caribbean, Botánica Cimarrón is a brand focused on healing marginalized people’s relationship to the earth through innovative tools and imaginative experiences that ensure the thriving futures of all living systems. In the past, they co-founded initiatives such as Abuela Taught me, an Afro-Taino Two-Spirit decolonial healing space; Homecoming, a QTBIPOC birth justice collective and Lenapehoking Herbalists Collective, an herbal mutual aid hub. 

Feliz has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally including The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; The Horse Hospital, London, UK; The Latinx Project at NYU, New York, NY; Articule, Montreal, Quebec; and others. They have been awarded fellowships, residencies, and grants at ACRE, Steuben, WI; Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange, Kaneohe, HI; Mohn LAND Grant, Los Angeles, CA; Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publication Grant, New York, NY; International Center of Photography Community Fellowship, New York, NY. Their work is part of the collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / NYPL, New York, NY; The Joan Flaschs’ Artist Book Collection, Chicago, IL; The Library at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. They are currently an MFA candidate at UCLA’s department of Interdisciplinary Studio.