Claudia Borgna ‘15 was born in Germany, raised in Italy and completed a fine art degree at the London Metropolitan University. 

Before coming to the Otis MFA Public Practice program she was exhibiting internationally and had received several prestigious residencies and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Grant, the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Grant, and the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship Award.
 

Through installation, performance and video art she has developed an aesthetic of eco-feminism that explores the political, social and environmental functions of art making. She questions how the “plastic” and the natural realms interact with one another through ephemeral structures of discarded shopping bags that are surprising beautiful. Plastic bags epitomize the quintessential discarded object, a symbolic vessel wandering across the landscape.

Claudia’s ironic and hard-hitting performances and videos, a product of her time in Los Angeles, have deepened her insights into how gender, race, class based-division of labor and distribution of property manage to structure our knowledge and inform our interactions with nature. As Claudia suggests, “The health of human and social bodies, minds and souls are inevitably tied to their relation to the natural realms. In the end social, racial and economic justices are interdependent to the well-being of the environment.”