Isabel Löfgren (b.1975) is a Swedish-Brazilian artist and researcher currently living in Stockholm, Sweden. She holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Smith College, USA; an MFA from the Post-graduate Program in Visual Languages at the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro (PPGAV/EBA- UFRJ), Brazil; and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thinking from the European Graduate School, Switzerland. She was a participant of CuratorLab 2010-11. She has been active with art exhibitions and working in artist collectives and artist-run spaces since 2002. She works in collaboration with local communities and artist collectives in participatory projects that include the poetics of communication and narrative flows and political emancipation in urban and/or site-inspired art installations.
With CuratorLab, she created the project Satellitstaden (2011-2012) which formed the practice-based component of her Ph.D. thesis "Hospitality and its Other: Art, Media, Migration and the Divided City", awarded summa cum laude at the European Graduate School in the summer of 2015. Since Satellitstaden, she has worked with a new artistic research project Mãe Preta | Black Mother with Brazilian artist Patricia Gouvêa, with exhibitions and educational initiatives linking archival research into the representation of motherhood in slavery archives in Brazil connected to contemporary Afro-Brazilian feminist movements winning multiple exhibition awards mainly in Brazil. In Sweden, from 2016-2018 she co-founded the collective IDA - Institute for the Decolonization of Art with artist Estella Burga and art historian and writer Macarena Dusant, conducting research into representation of marginalized identities in the Swedish cultural scene, as well as performative lectures, publications, articles and participatory artistic projects. In 2017, IDA was awarded a public commission to work with youth with migrant backgrounds and filmmaking in Haninge municipality together with curator Paola Zamora, resulting in a series of four short films under the title "Letters from Jordbro”.
Isabel Löfgren has worked as a curator for Learning at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in 2017. Since 2017, she is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Södertörns högskola in Stockholm, where she teaches media activism, media archaelogy, media production, and visual narratives with photography and film. She also writes articles and participates in conferences covering these topics.
For more information see: www.maepreta.net, www.satellitstaden.tv, www.isabellofgren.com, www.i-d-a.se