“Matt Manalo’s environmentally conscious artistic and social practices support and nurture an ever-increasing AAPI arts/maker/immigrant community by repurposing raw materials and objects to confront and reinterpret notions of displacement, belonging, and accessibility.” – Juror Phillip A. Townsend, Curator of Art, Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS), The University of Texas at Austin.

Matt Manalo is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in Manila, Philippines and resides in Houston. He received his Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting at the University of Houston. His environmentally conscious work incorporates raw materials and found objects and tackles ideas surrounding his own immigrant identity, displacement, and how “home” is defined. Manalo is influenced by the physical and social structures that exist in both the Philippines and the United States as well as the erasure of histories and presence of colorism that have resulted from colonization.

His work was recently seen in the exhibition, Carriers: The Body as a Site of Danger and Desire, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas curated by Tyler Blackwell and Steven Matijcio and he is included in the 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape/ A Possible Horizon curated by Evan Garza and Ryan Dennis. Manalo is the founder of Filipinx Artists of Houston, a collective of visual, performing, literary, culinary, and multidisciplinary artists. He also runs an alternative art space: Alief Art House, a hub for creativity that highlights the cultural richness of the multiple communities within a unique Houston neighborhood.