Nancy Dayanne Valladares (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Her work seeks to trace the cultural and linguistic transactions that occur when bodies are translated from one geography to another. Through writing, photography and filmmaking, Valladares utilizes the material culture of Honduras, to reconfigure forms representation and storytelling.

 
Valladares completed her Bachelor in Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was the recipient of the Endsley Memorial Fellowship, a Distinguished Scholar Award, and the World Less Traveled Grant. Her work has been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries, SUGS Gallery X,
ExFest Film Festival, The Research House for Asian Art, Columbia College, and Roman Susan Gallery. Nancy Valladares lives and works in Chicago.

Here is her artist statement:
Grandmother buried our chords umbilical beneath the soil.

 
She had saved them in a little glass jar until it was time to expand the
boundaries of our home, and nestled them in one of the concrete
pillars. She did that with her children’s, and I like to think her
grandmother did so as well.

 
Her action was a prayer, that we would remain anchored to those sites
where our tiny bones stretched and milk teeth were shed. From her I
inherited a labyrinth of stories, now faded by memory—like the
photographs of our home we keep in a tiny case under our closet.

 
My relationship to soil is that of alchemy and storytelling. Buried
beneath it, within it, are ancient ledgers that document the many
transactions that occur between bodies.

partial traces
incomplete registers
silent offerings that have no name.

 
So I excavate. I photograph. I bury. I drown.”

Please check out her video “4 movement and the birth of the sun”: