For nearly four decades, Katia Tirado has made the body a territory of resistance, desire, and dissent. Her practice embodies a lucid rebellion against the structures of power and transforms lived experience into a poetics of insurrection and memory.

She has been awarded the National System of Art Creators grant three times (2012, 2018 and 2024) and has been a member since 2011 of the Austrian/Mexican collective Association for Freedom of Movement, an artistic research collective that seeks to redefine the relevance of performance art in the current socio-political and cultural landscape. This is her fourth time working with the Dartmouth student community, an experience that has forged important academic and personal connections with the College.

Katia Tirado was born in Mexico City in 1965. There she was not only part of the independent theater scene, but also a member of the university theater. In the 90s her focus shifted, besides continuing her theatrical work, towards Plastic Arts and Performance referring to the tradition of Situationism and Art-Action. She incorporates in her work other plastic languages such as installation, video and photo and experiments with the modern technologies of body manipulation and Fakirism. During the last two decades, her work with the body has expanded to include the production of objects, video animations, and monumental sculptures. 

Her work as an artist is situated and developed over more than four decades of rigorous exploration of the body as a materiality of artistic action and intervention, focused on a systematic deconstruction of conventional supports and forms. Her trajectory and methodology have sought to fracture the spaces and devices of construction and representation of the subject through practices that transgress, dislocate, subvert and ritualize the dichotomies that underpin the normativity of these subjects and their homogenized reproduction. The body is understood here as a support of subjectivity, but also as a space that processes and distills memory: that is, as a machine of cognition and sensorial, political, affective and poetic production. 

The experiences accumulated in the direction of a practice that destabilizes gender constructions, the boundaries between the public and the private, as well as modes of ritualization of the profane and the abject have allowed her to build a language that can be understood as a performatic of the poetics of the body and its critical dismantling as a space of repression and domestication. 

Her performance and object-based work has been presented in major museums and galleries around the world: Poland, China, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Spain, England, Colombia, México and the United States.