Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. A long-time educator, she is a Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.

Stephanie Syjuco’s work recycles, copies, resuscitates, warps, reframes, rips off, plunders, and hinges on existing forms and historical archives because the past is still unfinished business. Her large-scale installations utilize photo and image-based processes to create densely layered works that are a result of deep research and archival investigation. By examining institutional, governmental, and museum archives and collections, she focuses on how power manifests in visible and invisible ways—from American colonial regimes to overseas authoritarian legacies, in an attempt to “talk back” to the official narrative. At stake is how to form an alternative to a codified, exclusionary definition of nationhood and citizenship.

Her recent projects use digital imaging processes (green screen backdrops, Photoshop filters, pixelation, and other manipulated techniques), pairing them with meticulous hand-crafted analog formats (textiles, sculptural displays, large format paper collage prints, outmoded reproduction methods) in an attempt to create productive frictions across different time periods. In some projects, she actively conceals or remove the subject as a way to shift the viewer’s focus back on to structures of power—for example, to expose the museum display apparatus (“Blind Spot (Artifacts),” 2025), or to protect an individual from identification (“Total Transparency (Portrait of N),” 2018).

“I want my work to act as a catalyst—a way to reframe what has come before so we can envision ourselves out of what has been defined as settled history.”