Born in Cuba, Mendieta moved to Iowa at age 12 with her sister as part of a US government asylum program for adolescents after the Cuban revolution. Mendieta eventually enrolled at the University of Iowa and, upon completing her undergraduate degree, began her graduate studies in art. After training as a painter, Mendieta quickly grew dissatisfied with the medium and transitioned to the university’s new MFA in Intermedia program, where she began to develop her interdisciplinary work.

As a graduate student, Mendieta created her first performances, which survive through photographic documentation. These early works deal with the theme of violence against women, as Mendieta evokes the suffering of the female body.

Throughout her career, Mendieta’s explorations of representation were grounded in an intersectional conception of identity where race, gender, age, and class operated simultaneously. “As non-white women, our struggles are two-fold,” Mendieta wrote in a curatorial statement for an exhibition of women artists of colour. “This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’”

Photo credit: Ana Mendieta, 1973