Praba Pilar bio

A Bay Area/Colombian multi-disciplinary artist, Praba Pilar has worked on multiple projects in the public sphere through performances, installations, and interactive projects. 

Most recently Ms. Pilar has been producing performances on Cyborg interactions, presenting her Cyborg Soap Opera, at galleries in the Bay Area, and the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno, a divine intervention into the messianic fervor of agents of the technology revolution. Other recent work has focused on the effects of information and communication technologies on women around the world. She is currently exhibiting work from a new series titled Cyber.Labia, which is an extended “cyber-talk” on gender, race and technologies. This series has culminated in prints and an art book of interviews with cyberworkers and theorists, scripts, images and a companion DVD. Over 2004-06 Ms. Pilar toured her solo performance, Computers Are A Girl’s Best Friend to Sweden, Montreal, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Albany. This performance counters the sexiness of the computer industry by disrobing the truth of the exportation of toxic electronic waste to Asia; net based gyno-slavery; net based trafficking, telesexuality; Real Dolls and other extraordinary aspects of the computer revolution.

Ms. Pilar has performed at The LAB, Galeria de la Raza, the SF Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Studio XX and the Darling Foundry in Montreal, the Museum of World Culture in Sweden, and public streets and universities around the United States. She has participated in panel presentations organized by Teknica Radika, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, The SF Museum of Modern Art, Critical Resistance, the Living Word Festival, the Media Alliance and several universities and galleries locally and around the country. Her work has been featured in MIT's "Race in Digital Space" Conference and in UC Santa Cruz's Social Change Across Borders Conference. Ms. Pilar is beginning a Doctoral Program in Performance as Practice at UC Davis, and is the recent recipient of the UC Davis President's Pre-Doctoral Award (2007), a Puffin Foundation Grant (2004), the Creative Capital Foundation Award (2002), Zellerbach Family Fund Award (2002), the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize of New Langton Arts (2001) and the Creative Work Fund Grant (2000).  She recently completed a Master Residency with MacArthur Fellow Pepon Osorio (2000) at MACLA San Jose, and was featured in a book on inspirational women by Cathleen Rountree,  On Women Turning Thirty: Making Choices, Finding Meaning (2000).