“Minaya’s work around the notion of ‘tropical identity’ elicits a palpable tension between critique and seduction. Her wildly decorated, alluring environments and images carry a biting commentary on the ways in which privilege injures ecology and the body, while at the same time, it slyly purges those impositions.” – Kelly Taxter, Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art The Jewish Museum

“Joiri Minaya’s practice explores the violence but also privilege, politic, and economy of leisure and the ‘holes’ found therein: what is seen/not seen, who/what is accessed, what is taken/left behind and the way that the decorative as design challenge, geopolitic, and propaganda can disguise or redress this.” – Legacy Russell, Associate Curator of Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem

Joiri Minaya (b. 1990, New York) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose work investigates the female body within constructions of identity, multicultural social spaces and hierarchies. Minaya’s work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. Reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North, Minaya uses gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as ground for creativity.

Minaya has exhibited internationally across the Caribbean and the U.S. She attended the ENAV (Santo Domingo), the Altos de Chavon School and Parsons/New School. Minaya is a grantee from the Nancy Graves Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (Emerging Artist Grant), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (Emerging Artist and Painters and Sculptors Grants), the Great prize and the Audience Award XXV Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes, among others. 

Joiri Minaya is the recipient of the 2020 New York Artadia Award.