Tamara Santibañez (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. Their work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics, narrative terrains and the meanings we make from bodily adornment. As a trans artist, their practice memorializes the tactics and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build alternative worlds. Employing oil painting, ceramic, and leather working craft techniques, they animate symbols and accessories of queerness and rebellion with the visual lexicon of Mexican artisanal traditions, creating punk tees from tooled leather, belts from Talavera pottery, and paintings that equally honor loteria cards and gay bar latrinalia. In their practices as a tattoo artist and oral historian, they are fascinated by the body as a venue for archiving and accessing personal and collective narratives. Enlisting inanimate objects and architectures as stand-ins for human figures and relationships, they complicate the undulating exchange between power and vulnerability, otherness and assimilation, generational expectations and individual capability. In 2019 they were awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City and were a recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. Their work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, Selenas Mountain, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, and in performance at MoMA PS1, among others. They are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press). They received their BFA from Pratt Institute in Printmaking and MA in Oral History from Columbia University, awarded OHMA’s Future Voices Fellowship for 2021. Their writing has been featured by Precog Mag, Cause & Effect, and Cassandra Press.