Camilo Godoy, Colombian, b. 1989
Building upon his exploration of history, desire, and collective memory, Godoy has firmly established himself within the New York and international contemporary art landscapes through major museum residencies and institutional exhibitions. His practice continuously bridges the gap between historical archival research and immediate, embodied performance.
Godoy holds a deeply rooted connection to New York’s creative and academic spaces. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. He later completed his Master of Fine Arts in Photography at Columbia University. In addition to his studio practice, he is an active educator and faculty member, having taught and led public programs at institutions such as the School of Visual Arts (SVA), the Brooklyn Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the New-York Historical Society.
A major milestone in his career came during his tenure as the 2023–2024 Artist-in-Residence at the New Museum in New York. This residency culminated in the landmark performance piece renacemos a cada instante (We are reborn at every moment).
- The Inspiration: The title was adapted from an embroidered work by the late queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión (Renazco a cada instante), altered by Godoy to the plural “we” to emphasize collective healing, community resilience, and shared mourning practices.
- The Concept: The piece utilized his ongoing Choreographic Studies project—a vast personal archive of collaged images depicting the human body in states of ecstasy, eroticism, pain, and grief sourced from art history, pornography, and medical texts. Godoy used these images as physical dance notation, translating static historical representations of queer intimacy and trauma into fluid, collaborative movement.
Godoy’s solo and group exhibitions track a deliberate intersection of political critique, historic reckoning, and queer visibility:
- Neither one nor the other, but a wound (Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami): His first solo exhibition in Miami featured a sensory-immersive installation bathed in yellow-orange light, showcasing the video documentation of his New Museum performance alongside selected photographs from What did they actually see?.
- Amor Eficaz (Americas Society, New York): A performance merging speech, music, and dance that invoked the activism of his namesake, the Colombian revolutionary priest Father Camilo Torres Restrepo. The piece connected indigenous perceptions of temporality and Latin American Liberation Theology to critique historical extractivism in the Americas.
- Diplomacy (The New School, New York): An site-specific exhibition and performance in the historic Orozco Room, which interrogated Cold War geopolitics and the United States government's complex history of utilizing contemporary art as a tool of international diplomacy.
- Major Group Shows: Godoy's work has been prominently featured in historically significant group surveys, including the Brooklyn Museum’s “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow”: Art 50 Years After Stonewall, the Moody Center's States of Mind: Art and American Democracy, and the extensive touring exhibition Art AIDS America.
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