Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years, she created collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop – an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogue about identity, culture, and gender while creating community. This approach has helped museums and nonprofits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and Craft & Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Aguiñiga is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC and Creative Capital Grant Awardee. She has been the subject of a cover story for American Craft Magazine and has been featured in PBS’s Craft in America series.

Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the U.S.-Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border. Aguiñiga is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.

Headshot photo by Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of Museum of Arts and Design, New York.