Tania Bruguera is an artist and activist whose performances and installations examine political power structures and their effect on society's most vulnerable people. Her provocative works explore the ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life, tackling global issues of power, migration, censorship and repression in ways that turn “viewers” into “citizens”, seeking to transform social affect into political effectiveness. For Bruguera, art is a platform where new political potentials can be tested, performed and realised.

For over 25 years Bruguera has created proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, including a vocabulary better suited to defining politically-engaged art practice, especially her concepts Arte Útil (art as a tool) and Political Timing Specific art. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics, resulting in the realisation of projects such as Cátedra Arte de Conducta, Immigrant Movement International and Institute for Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR). In this way Bruguera sees herself as an initiator rather than an author, often collaborating with multiple institutions and many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.

Bruguera has been recognized as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine and was part of the team creating the first document on artistic freedom and cultural rights with the United Nations Human Rights Council. She is on the board of Artists at Risk, Gulf Labour and European Alternative and was on the founding board of FIELD, an online journal focused on socially engaged art criticism.

Bruguera has received many honours, including the Robert Rauschenberg Award, a Prince Claus Fund Laureate, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1st Neuberger Prize, the Herb Alpert Award, the Meadows Prize, being shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award and being a Hugo Boss Prize finalist. She is a Radcliffe and a Yale World Fellow and has been named a National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow.

Since the mid-1980s her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions as well as biennales and theater festivals around the world, including the Tate Turbine Hall Commission, Documenta 11, Venice Biennales (2001, 2005, 2009, 2015), Wiener Festwochen, Festival d’Automne à Paris and Performa. Her work is also included in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Van Abbemuseum, Tate Modern, Museum für Moderne Kunst and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.

She has extensive teaching experience, founded and directed the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (2003-09) in Havana, and been faculty at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (2009-15), Rijksakademie (2010-15), Universitá IUAV di Venezia (2006-08), University of Chicago (2006-10) and Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) (1992-97) as well as Visiting Faculty/Artist at many universities including San Francisco Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MIT and European Master in Migration and Intercultural Relations (EMMIR) among others.

She holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), as well as degrees from the Instituto Superior de Arte and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro in Havana, Cuba. She has been awarded Doctor Honoris Causa at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and from her alma mater (SAIC).

- Milani Gallery