Milagros de la Torre is a New York based artist whose work addresses how mechanisms of observation and image language respond to various notions of identity, violence, surveillance, censorship. She studied Communications Sciences at the University of Lima and received a B.A. (Hons) in Photographic Arts, University of the Arts London. Her first solo exhibition (1993), curated by Robert Delpire, was presented at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 1995, she was an artist in residence at the Cité des Arts and worked as a curatorial assistant in the Photography Department at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris.
She received the Rockefeller Foundation Artist Grant and was awarded the Romeo Martinez Photography Prize and the Young Ibero-American Creators Prize for her series The Lost Steps (1998).
De la Torre was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), The Dora Maar Fellowship (2014), The Peter S. Reed Foundation Award in Photography (2016) and was the recipient of a Merited Person of Culture medal from the Ministry of Culture in Peru (2016), the Sustainable Arts Foundation Residency Grant (2020) and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship Award (2021).
She is currently a Co-Chair for the Photography Department at the Bard College MFA program and has been a resident artist at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Tisch NYU; Artpace, San Antonio.
Her work has been exhibited broadly and is part of permanent museum collections including: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Yale University, New Haven; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The RISD Museum, Providence; Ruby City, The Linda Pace Foundation, Texas; Diane and Bruce Halle Collection, Phoenix; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, U.K.; Universidad de Salamanca, Spain; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico; Museo de Arte de Lima, MALI, Peru; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina; MALBA Museum, Argentina.
