Mara Ramirez
- 2D Arts 2026
Mara Ramirez is an artist and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA.
They are socially led and interdisciplinary; co-founding and organizing groups like Freak Comics Collective and Soft Screen (an experimental animation screening series and social practice). They are also a contributing illustrator for stories penned by youth published at the non-profit Chapter 510, and an educator who mentors young adults.
But they are first and foremost a storyteller fascinated by how sequence informs the way stories are received by the viewer. As a process led artist, their practice is somatic, utilizing tactile processes to express not only an image, but the underlying feelings. They are interested in materials that capture the idiosyncrasies of movement and that pick up small inflections of emotion through its translation from mind to hand. Thinking of drawing as residue of this process, they explore their emotions and experiences external to my own brain through comics. This haptic distillation of their experiences are utilized in an effort to investigate the connection points between themself and the world. Their symbolism is full of biological life such as microbes, individual organ systems, as well the larger organisms and external environments that hold them. In these processes, biorhythms become recurring spaces for ruminating on the duality of their experience as a nonbinary person.
But they are first and foremost a storyteller fascinated by how sequence informs the way stories are received by the viewer. As a process led artist, their practice is somatic, utilizing tactile processes to express not only an image, but the underlying feelings. They are interested in materials that capture the idiosyncrasies of movement and that pick up small inflections of emotion through its translation from mind to hand. Thinking of drawing as residue of this process, they explore their emotions and experiences external to my own brain through comics. This haptic distillation of their experiences are utilized in an effort to investigate the connection points between themself and the world. Their symbolism is full of biological life such as microbes, individual organ systems, as well the larger organisms and external environments that hold them. In these processes, biorhythms become recurring spaces for ruminating on the duality of their experience as a nonbinary person.