Diana López

Courtesy the artist and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Diana López (b. 1968, Philadelphia, USA) is a Venezuelan visual artist and cultural producer. Her work includes photography, video, performance, and installations. She developed her artistic style in the 1990s, focusing on participation and collaboration with other creators in the production of her pieces. In 1994, she became the first woman to receive the Eugenio Mendoza Art Prize. In 1996, she participated in MoMA PS1’s International Program. For over two decades, López has worked in cultural institutions devoted to local development and community participation. Between 2006 and 2013, she served as director of Chacao Municipality’s cultural office in Caracas, implementing strategies to revitalize urban communities, including public art programs, street festivals, and the construction of the Centro Cultural Chacao and the Library of Los Palos Grandes. Currently, she is the director of the Archivo Fotografía Urbana foundation.

A school without walls

LA ESCUELA___ began in 2021 with a reflection from its artistic director and co-founder, Miguel Braceli, about educational models for social practices and situated learning. This idea of bringing art and education closer to social realities by taking them out into public space became the building block of a project co-developed with the international foundation Siemens Stiftung. From this vision, LA ESCUELA___ was conceived as a “school without walls.”

Rather than operating from a fixed campus or following a predetermined curriculum, this artist-run platform works through a growing hemispheric network of artists, architects, educators, researchers, organizers, independent spaces, and communities. Its projects take shape in different contexts across the Americas, responding to local conditions while creating connections between places and practices.

Since 2022, LA ESCUELA___ has developed more than 45 projects in 13 countries, engaging more than 6,000 participants in online and on-site programs, and collaborating with over 350 artists and thinkers. Its programs include on-site experimental classrooms and online labs, residencies, public art, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, symposia, and research processes. An open-access Library with over 300 essays, interviews, documentation, and pedagogical resources expands this work into a growing alternative critical pensum of Latin American artistic and pedagogical practices.

At the heart of the platform is a commitment to reciprocal exchange: not exporting a model from one place to another, but creating conditions for different forms of knowledge to meet, circulate, and transform one another.