María Vargas Aguilar is an artist and educator from Guatemala City, currently residing both in Guatemala and the United States. Vargas Aguilar’s work considers the long-established artistic dialogue between abstraction and figuration in the context of images of state-sponsored violence. Her practice explores the use of disembodied viewpoints and their potential for meaning and new expressions of subjectivity. She received her B.A. in Painting and Video from Bennington College in 2018 and graduated High School from the United World Colleges program, where she later was a Visual Arts teacher at UWC Mahindra in India from 2018 to 2020. Vargas Aguilar is passionate about the practice of close-looking as a motor for inquiry based learning. She has experience teaching students of various ages including at the elementary, high school, undergraduate and graduate level. Vargas Aguilar holds an MFA from Yale School of Art. She has participated in residencies at RAPACES/Emerging Central-American Artists in Nicaragua, and the Henry Moore Artists in Residence program in England. Vargas Aguilar has been the recipient of various academic scholarships and awards from UWC, Bennington College, Yale School of Art and the Shelby Davis foundation.
