BIO

Nina Rivera (b. 2001) is a Mexican-American artist whose work engages a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. They were born in Saint Paul, MN and currently reside in Minneapolis, MN. Their work explores the relationships between the body, disorder, and the absurd in the digital age. In 2025, they earned their BFA Fine Arts Studio degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. They have participated within the NE SCULPTURE | Gallery Factory Emerging Artist Fellowship Residency program and the Graves Foundation Creating Change Gallery Fellowship program. They were awarded the MCAD Visual Scholarship, MCAD NOW Scholarship, and the MCAD Fine Arts Studio Merit Scholarship Award. They presented their solo exhibition, Default Mode Network (Minneapolis, MN), and duo exhibition, Hybrid Quiddity (Minneapolis, MN) in 2025. They have participated and co-curated a group exhibition, Recordando Nuestra Herencia, Dibujando El Camino (Minneapolis, MN). Their work has also been showcased in exhibitions at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (Minneapolis, MN), Vine Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), Pride Cultural Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), Flux Arts Building (Minneapolis, MN), Squirrel Haus Arts (Minneapolis, MN), Mirror-Lab (Minneapolis, MN), and Fresh Eye Gallery (Minneapolis, MN). 

Engaging in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography, I examine the absurd relationships and psychological conflation between identity, digital influence, and disorder. As our climate conditions constantly alter, whether social, environmental, political or economic, we have reached a point in time with a guaranteed existential threat to all species and unprecedented technology rewiring our mode of processing. Raised amid the boom of the world wide web, particularly social media, I have developed critical concern over social disengagement and advancing isolation provoked by our integration with technology. 

The philosophical lens of posthumanism focuses on how today’s technologies, consisting of AI, the internet and biotechnology, reshape human identity and relationships with the world. It questions autonomy, power structures, and progress, proposing humans to no longer be separate from the systems and machines we interact with on a daily basis. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theory, posthumanism considers fluidity, hybridity, and the importance of marginalized perspectives in shaping our techno-cultural futures.

Prior to studying the theory, I developed an analogous perspective via a radical fluctuation between nihilistic and absurdist sentiment since preadolescence. All factors considered, essentially, the foundation of my art is to deconstruct the intersections of mental disorder and contemporary hazards of the human experience.