Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), ONE Archives (LA) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few.  She has received the Creative Capital Award, the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, the Art Matters Grant, the Eisner Film and Video Prize, The Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, The Eureka Fellowship, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award among others. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Art in America, ArtNews and in various academic journals and books nationally and internationally. 

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE! and Survived and Punished, both national feminist of color organizations dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, Art Practice/Studio and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses at various Universities. Past adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: Stanford University, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts.  Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and attended the Post-Colonial Studies program held at the Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Campus Affiliations: 

Center for Race and Gender

 Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies