Vicuña, Leonora

(Chile 1952)

Between 1973 and 1978, she lived in Paris, where she studied Social Sciences. With a degree in Anthropology, she returned to her country and completed professional photography studies at the Escuela Fotoarte in Santiago de Chile, graduating in 1979. In 2000, she obtained a diploma in multimedia production from the École Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ESRA) in Paris.

As a cultural manager, she participated in the creation and realization of the Encuentros de Arte Joven (Young Art Encounters) (1979-1981) at the Instituto Cultural de Las Condes in Santiago, now known as Corporación Cultural. She co-directed the poetry magazine La Gota Pura with poets Ramón Díaz Eterovic and Aristóteles España in 1981. Along with a significant group of photographers, she helped found the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (AFI) before returning to France in 1983, where she collaborated on numerous animation and film editing projects, including Alejandro Jodorowsky's feature film The Rainbow Thief.

In 2013 and 2014, she participated in the América Latina 1940-2013 exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain and at Paris-Photo at the Grand Palais; in 2014 at ICP in New York in the Urbes Mutantes exhibition and at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico. In 2016, she was present at the Armory Show in New York, Photo London, and the Faces Cachées exhibition at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine in Paris. In 2019-2020, she exhibited in Sol negro as part of FotoMéxico. Her work is included in private collections such as those of Anna Gamazo de Abelló and Leticia and Stalislas Poniatowsky, in Spain and France respectively.

She has worked as a professor at various universities and institutes in Chile, both in Santiago and Araucanía. She has conducted workshops throughout the country for the National Council of Culture and Arts, now the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Heritage, and was head of the Journalism and Author Photography programs at Instituto Alpes de la Comunicación until 2018. Since 2021, she has been directing Puerto-Peral, a space for workshops and residencies for poets and visual artists, in the commune of Carahue, Araucanía, which is also her residence.