BFA, Rhode Island School of Design. MFA, Yale School of Art. Based in Brooklyn, Oliveira works across textiles, metals, sculpture, performance, and installation to explore the intersections of marginalized material cultures, narratives, and aesthetics; craft, metal working, quilting; fan fiction and science fiction; and marginalized identity. Their research moves between the lurid aesthetics of Italian giallo cinema and the ecstatic writings of early-modern women mystics, collapsing temporal registers of industrial labor, spiritual ecstasy, martyrdom, and the visual economy of horror. Oliveira has had solo presentations at Geary Contemporary, Disclaimer Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, BRIC (all New York), and Boccanera Gallery (Milan), as well as two-person and group exhibitions at Yve Yang (New York), Unosunove (Rome), SPURS Gallery (Beijing), Perrotin (New York), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), BEERS (London), Good Mother (Los Angeles), Baik + Khneysser (Los Angeles), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids), Van Doren Waxter, Lehman College Art Gallery, and 1969 Gallery (all New York). They received the Dean’s Prize from the Yale School of Art, a public art commission from the City of New York, and the Abbey Awards Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Oliveira has also been awarded fellowships and grants from NYFA, BRIC, Silver Art Projects, the Museum of Arts and Design, Wave Hill, Ars Nova, A.I.R. Gallery, Yaddo, and the Tides Institute. They are currently the Endeavor Fellow at Sarah Lawrence College and Wartburg. SLC, 2025–
Undergraduate Courses 2025-2026
Visual and Studio Arts
Future-Tense Liquidation I: Collaboration, Speculation, and Archaeologies of the Future
Open, Seminar—Fall
ARTS 3450
This course will be about extraterrestrial ambivalence, the tragedy of the cyber commons, haunted houses and dead malls, pissing in the data stream, putting sugar in the gas tank, and creepy crawling toward ambiguous utopias. Through shared readings, discussions, guest interventions, and lectures, students and residents of the Wartburg Senior Living Facility will collaboratively create a text for performance, treating the ensemble, the classroom, and the commune as imperfect, messy sites for speculating about the future. We will traverse the slow-motion disasters of capital and collapse, its false horizons and concealed architectures, anarchist thought, and ontological slippage. Taking an intergenerational and cross-disciplinary approach, we will assemble a fractured, provisional text. The resulting work will consider an imagined future imbued with the inherent instability of cooperation, language, and shared authorship. Students will engage in writing exercises in small groups and in collaboration with Wartburg residents to craft characters, fictional oral histories, and speculative futures that will serve as the foundation for a collectively written performance text. Our work will expand into a companion course in the spring, where students will collaboratively bring the written text to life through devised performance, puppets, objects, costumes, music, and sets, culminating in a public performance developed in ongoing dialogue with Wartburg residents.
Faculty
Future-Tense Liquidation II: Performance, (Dis)Possession, and Haunted Futures
Open, Seminar—Spring
ARTS 3455
An echo, response, and expansion of the fall course, Future-Tense Liquidation I: Collaboration, Speculation, and Archaeologies of the Future (ARTS 3450), this course will invite students and Wartburg residents to bring to life the speculative, intergenerational text developed in fall by animating it through performance. The course will center on the messy, collective act of making through puppetry, movement, sound, installation, and costume. Futures paved over, marked down, seized, sold to the highest bidder...in this course, we open the body and the performance up to possession by the ghosts of those dispossessed futures. Students will work in small groups and in ongoing workshops and dialogue with Wartburg residents to generate the visual, sonic, and material world of the piece: building objects, writing songs, choreographing gestures, and repurposing debris. Emphasis will be placed on collaboration across difference, material experimentation, and the unpredictability of process. Readings and references from fall will remain in rotation, with new material introduced in response to the needs of the developing work. Guest artists in sound, movement, and performance will guide workshops at Wartburg attended and facilitated by SLC students. The course will culminate in a public-performance event, with all its seams, fractures, and ambiguities visible. This course welcomes students in visual art, theatre, performance, music, video, sound, design, dance, writing, or any other interdisciplinary practice.