This post was updated Oct. 15 at 8:43 p.m.
A UCLA alumnus is building her own personal art genre.
Brenda Barrios graduated from UCLA in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in art and graduated from the Yale School of Art with a master of fine arts in 2025. Now, Barrios, a Los Angeles local and multidisciplinary artist, returns to California ready to showcase her work at REDCAT’s New Original Works, an interdisciplinary festival highlighting LA artists, where she said she will showcase dance, theater and new original music. With experience in multiple art forms, Barrios mixes performance with sculpture to represent different facets of her identity, she said.
“What inspires me (is) usually who I am as a person,” Barrios said. “Past relationships, family values, being Mexican, remembering how I used to go to Mexico and things like that.”
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While Barrios’ professional journey with art began during community college, she said she recalls performing at her apartment complex when she was around 10 years old and being selected to make her first art piece in second grade after entering a competition focused on climate change awareness.
The artist said her work draws inspiration from pop culture and identity. Themes of healing and the human body are particularly present in Barrios’ pieces, derived from an autoimmune diagnosis the artist received in 2018, an event she said changed the way she views her work.
Martin Kersels, a UCLA alumnus and professor at the Yale School of Art, said he values Barrios’ ability to reflect autobiographical elements in her work and transform them in ways that audiences can connect to. Similarly, Barrios’ friend and occasional collaborator, Marcelline Mandeng, said the artist contributes to the diversity of the field, making art accessible to multiple audiences, pushing viewers to engage with unfamiliar concepts.
“Her work feels like an homage to where she’s from, to her family, to her historical legacy, to the place she calls home,” Mandeng said. “It also considers the audience that interacts with those records, … even if the sort of references are not the same.”
Barrios said while many audience members have had emotional reactions to her work, she has always strived to use a playful and humorous tone. She added that she also likes to make her work visually confusing, opting to make materials appear to be something else, such as “La troquita,Laquebradita,” a sculpture of a sinking truck made for her graduate thesis. The steel sculpture was purposely created to look like ceramic from a distance, alluding to imperceptible disabilities, since she said, like with the truck, people can make wrong assumptions about health simply based on visual cues.
Currently, Barrios said she has also been focusing on creating dolls, an idea born during her time in graduate school, but stemming from work she did at UCLA. “Muñequita muy muy La comadre homegirl,” a life-size porcelain doll and replica of the artist’s body made with a silicone cast, is the first piece of this kind, she said. The doll – which has served as an accompanying piece to “La troquita,Laquebradita” – was the beginning of a new trend in her work, one that has also transcended into her performance pieces, she said.
Barrios said part of her mixing of mediums – sculpture and performance – can be attributed to her time at UCLA. After she transferred to UCLA, the university provided her with the freedom to make whatever pieces she wished, creating opportunities for her to explore multiple art disciplines, she said.
Additionally, the mixing of mediums also comes from the act of destroying and putting things back together when creating, a process that makes it easier to see where other forms of art fit into pieces, she said. In terms of performance, she said she likes the ever-changing nature of the act. Barrios’ friend, Josh Rabineau, said Barrios’ style of performance brings life into her sculptures, “blurring the lines” between the performer and the piece.
“It screams Brenda. It’s playful. It’s loud. It’s colorful. It’s humorous,” Rabineau said. “My favorite work (is) when … you can really feel the spirit and the personality of the artist behind their pieces.”
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After graduating in 2025, Barrios said she is preparing for her residency opening next month at CalArts’ Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater from Nov. 12-14. She said she is working on three new sculptures, including a doll she will dance with during the show. Barrios said she did not think she would be selected for the art festival, but took the chance to apply, since she hoped to regain her footing in the city.
“Everybody graduates from Yale School of Art, and they go to New York,” Barrios said. “Me coming back to LA felt like, ‘Am I doing the right choice?’ I think this was perfect, especially because my work is about LA too … I am just happy to be creating in Los Angeles.”
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