Celia Irina González awarded the 2025 CCI + WOPHA Fellowship

WOPHA / 08.12.2025

Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), in partnership with the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), proudly announces Celia Irina González as the recipient of the 2025 CCI + WOPHA Fellowship.

The CCI + WOPHA Fellowship supports emerging to mid-career women and non-binary photographers from the Caribbean and its diaspora, offering a one-month residency, mentorship, curatorial guidance, and institutional support. The 2025 fellowship was juried by Tatiana Flores, Jefferson Scholars Foundation Edgar F. Shannon Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia.

Born in Havana in 1985 and based in Mexico City, González holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and a Master’s in Visual Anthropology from FLACSO (Ecuador). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Emergent/cy, Vienna; Cuba Dispersa, Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit; Arte Latinoamericano, Colección MEIAC, Badajoz; Sin Authorización: Contemporary Cuban Art, Wallach Art Gallery, New York; Ojos de hueso, Ángeles Baños Gallery, Spain; the Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India; the Cuban Pavilion at the Venice Biennial; and the Lyon Biennial. She has been awarded the Botín Foundation Grant for Visual Arts (Spain) and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants & Commissions Program (Miami), with residencies including Reinbeckhallen (Berlin), Matadero Madrid in collaboration with Artista x Artista, KulturKontakt (Vienna), and the Skills Biennial (Aberdeen).

During her residency in September at El Espacio 23, González will join fellow 2025 WOPHA Artists-in-Residence Kat Thompson and Nathyfa Michel. She will continue her ongoing project Looking with the Bone, a speculative video installation exploring the human–chiton relationship as a metaphor for Caribbean history and resilience. Chitons—mollusks with thousands of microscopic eyes in their aragonite shells—regrow these eyes as a form of protection. Drawing on this biological phenomenon, González envisions the “Caribbean human” as a being transformed by centuries of colonial violence, developing bone eyes to see both in and out of water. The work critiques the region’s violent histories while imagining a future in which humans and marine life are symbiotically connected, with the sea as an extension of Caribbean territory.

The 2025 CCI + WOPHA Fellowship is presented by PAMM’s Caribbean Cultural Institute in collaboration with Women Photographers International Archive, with the support of El Espacio 23.

About

The Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) is a curatorial and research platform at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) that promotes the art of the Caribbean and its diasporas through scholarship, exhibitions, fellowships, public programs, and collection development. Its Fellowship program fosters art projects and research that advance cultural development and scholarship in the Caribbean and its diasporas, cultivating new ideas that challenge traditional conceptions of Caribbean art, generating innovative studies on the region, and reflecting on the contemporary state of Caribbean art and thought.

About CCI + WOPHA Fellowship

The CCI + WOPHA Fellowship supports emerging to mid-career women and non-binary photographers based in Miami, the Caribbean, or its diasporas, whose projects would benefit from access to WOPHA and PAMM’s institutional resources.

About El Espacio 23

El Espacio 23 is a contemporary art space founded by collector and philanthropist Jorge M. Pérez. Located within a repurposed 28,000 square foot warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood, El Espacio 23 serves artists, curators, and the general public with regular exhibitions, residencies, and a variety of special projects drawn from the Pérez Collection.