Malu Valerio
(Cumaná, Venezuela, 1982) Artist and activist. Malu grew up in different cities in Venezuela and South America with her nomadic family. She studied in a rural school in the Venezuelan Amazon and Visual Arts at the Instituto Universitario Armando Reverón (2007); Contemporary Art at the Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas and Sala Mendoza (2019); and Gender Equity and Human Rights at the Universidad de Los Andes (2021). She advocates for human, gender, and environmental rights with the collectives Sobrepasadas and Mujeres contra las violencias. Valerio was recognized as an activist by the Human Rights Commission (Codhez) for her artistic work focusing on gender and the defense of human rights, in 2021. She received the Aica Young Artist Award 2020 (International Association of Art Critics) and the #15 Eugenio Mendoza Prize (Fundación Sala Mendoza, 2019). In the framework of the Forum El Siglo de las Mujeres (Goethe Institut Bolivia, 2022), she presented Hacer la sopa, cuadernos de recetas, in La Paz, together with eleven women artists from Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela. In 2023, she exhibited the project El tiempo se diluye, diálogo con el archivo de cocina de Antonieta Sosa (Abra Caracas).
