Bella Maria Varela

Bella Maria Varela is an artist based in Columbia, MO, and Austin, TX. Her work integrates photography, video, performance, and fleece blankets to layer personal experiences with American history and popular culture. Through her multimedia practice, Bella has developed a hybrid language to represent her family’s journey from Guatemala, across the U.S.-Mexico border, to Washington, D.C.

Bella received her Master’s degree in Photo, Video, and Imaging from the University of Arizona School of Art (2021), where she was a Mellon-Fronteridades Graduate Fellow. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Blaffer Museum (Houston, TX), Centro de Artes Gallery (San Antonio, TX), Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX), Mass Gallery (Austin, TX), Borders Arts Residency (El Paso, TX), CAV Gallery (Las Cruces, NM), Stop Gap (Columbia, MO), the Cohen New Works Festival (Austin, TX), 1415 Gallery (Albuquerque, NM), and Troost Gardens (Kansas City, MO).

From 2022 to 2024, Bella served as an Early Career Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin as part of the Expanding Approaches to American Art initiative, where she taught Developing Joyful Creative Practice, an interdisciplinary arts course. She currently teaches as an adjunct professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. Her upcoming solo exhibition, Blanket Zone, will be presented at Big Medium in Austin,TX as part of the Tito’s Prize.