Grant Recipients Grants to Artists Visual Arts 2026

Elle Pérez

Portrait of Elle Perez. Perez is looking directly at the camera with their head tilted to the side. They are standing in front of what appears to be a wall of vibrant green plants with large leaves. To the left of the frame a silver car and a washed tan brick building are visible. Perez is dressed in a black t-shirt and raincoat and their curly hair is cropped short.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
  • 2026 Grants to Artists
  • Visual Arts
  • Visual Artist
  • Born 1989, Bronx, NY
  • Lives in New York, NY
  • They/Them
  •  
  • Additional Information
  • cargocollective.com/elleperez

Artist Statement

The archives we each make allow us to speak to the future, to tell others we were here, to say we were alive.

- February 2026

Biography

Elle Pérez is an artist working across photography, collage, and moving image. Their work depicts intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details within the love and violence of everyday life. Pérez’s photographs balance casual observation with conceptual and formalist considerations: intentionally sequenced installations, collages that act as mind maps, and structuralist films that highlight the tension between image and text, description and embodiment. Their work celebrates the ambiguity inherent to photography and queerness—a photograph is not an illustration, it can both resist discursive limitations and hold meaning beyond language. Pérez made their first photographs as a teenager while attending punk shows in the Bronx. They have continued making artwork made for the audience it grows out of, rather than simply being about them.

Solo exhibitions by Pérez include The World Is Always Again Beginning, History with the Present, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2025); guabancex, 47 Canal, New York, NY (2023); Intimacies, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Devotions, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2022); Host, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA (2021); from sun to sun, Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2019); Diablo, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2018); among others. 

Their work has been featured in group exhibitions including no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022); Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, Barbican Centre, London, United Kingdom (2020); the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in the 50th Year of the Stonewall Era, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2019); among others.

Pérez is a recipient of the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize (2023), the Vermont Studio Center Civil Society Institute Fellowship (2015), the Theo Westenberger Foundation Photography Prize (2014), and a Bronx Recognizes Its Own Grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts (2012).

They hold an M.F.A. from Yale University (2015) and a B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art (2011). Pérez is an Assistant Professor of Graduate Photography at Yale University.

junior peeking, 2013/2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York, NY.

An installation of

Installation view of guabancex at 47 Canal, New York, NY, 2023. Photo by Joerg Lohse, courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York, NY.

Kiss, from the series Somewhere We Belong, 2009/2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York, NY.

untitled (break shore), 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York, NY.

Installation view of

Installation view of Elle Pérez: Intimacies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, and 47 Canal, New York, NY. Photo by Kaelan Burkett.

untitled (the world is always again beginning), 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York, NY.

untitled (king), 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York, NY.