Photography Educator: Lorena Molina – LENSCRATCH

©Lorena Molina, Sunflowers, Biomaterials and images, 2026

Photography Educator is a month-to-month sequence on Lenscratch that highlights excellent images lecturers who encourage college students of all ages. Each month, the sequence celebrates an educator’s insights, methods, and excellence in fostering creativity and resilience.

Every month on Lenscratch, I look ahead to that includes a devoted images educator and their college students. For August, it provides me nice pleasure to shine the sunshine on artist, educator, and curator Lorena Molina. Read Lorena’s considerate responses to my questions and discover a small choice of her art work alongside the voices and statements from her college students; you’ll see she really goes all in for her college students. As an interdisciplinary artist, she brings a beneficiant, collaborative strategy to instructing, and her observe frequently threads collectively experimentation and group. Her deep dedication to her personal creative observe provides her college students a mannequin of rigor and curiosity that extends properly past the classroom. I lengthy to expertise her work in particular person some day, alongside the excellent work of her college students.

This article features a choice of Lorena’s work, an interview and work from her college students.

My work is formed by my expertise as a Salvadoran immigrant and by the afterlives of pressured migration, colonialism, and imperial violence. I draw from my household’s oral histories, ancestral meals practices, and the on a regular basis ecologies that maintain each histories of survival and oppression. Through set up, images, efficiency, sound, microbiology, textiles, and group engagement, I look at displacement, the politics of visibility, and what it means to return when return just isn’t doable.
My observe insists on embodiment.I take advantage of sensorial parts as methodology that goal to activate reminiscence by means of scent, style, humidity, decay, and proximity as a option to destabilize the emotional distance establishments typically impose on traumatic histories and to foreground the physique as a web site the place geopolitics, migration, and care co-exist.
The ecologies in my work carry political, historic, and cultural weight. Corn, beans, and low have lengthy been central to resistance, survival, and colonization throughout Latin America. Coffee, a crop tied to exploitative labor and land dispossession, underscores how agriculture has been weaponized in opposition to communities and the way these violences stay entangled with U.S. imperialism and compelled migration.
In my latest photographic works, I blur the boundaries between physique, picture, and surroundings. In Soy El Clima, I merge panorama and the corporeal by incorporating breath, saliva, and different bodily fluids to rework the ambiance of the picture; in these works, I turn out to be the climate. I proceed this inquiry in The Fermenting Archive, a mission that makes use of fermentation and cultures as each course of and metaphor to discover migration, reminiscence, and kinship on the microbial degree. I create photographic portraits throughout El Salvador, Texas, and California, exposing every picture to the micro organism and microbes residing in these home areas in order that the surroundings itself transforms the picture over time. 
Community is central to all of my work. I collaborate with diasporic Salvadorans, immigrant communities, and long run companions throughout El Salvador and the United States. My observe refuses to carry out trauma for institutional consumption. I’m not concerned with spectacle or in translating my group’s ache into digestible narratives. Instead, my work goals to construct situations for accountability, have fun opacity, and create areas the place care is political and pleasure is taken severely. Belonging is cultivated relationally, not by means of extractive or oversimplified types of illustration. I create work for the individuals who carry these histories with me and for these prepared to sit down with their complexity, not as distant observers, however as members in imagining futures rooted in solidarity and mutual care.

©Lorena Molina, Houston, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Tia Dinora, Biomaterials, microbes and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, El peñón, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, The fermenting Archive samples, Biomaterials, microbes and images, 2026

ES: For slightly background, are you able to share how you bought into instructing? Did you at all times wish to be a instructor within the arts? 
LM: The indisputable fact that I’m a school professor continues to be slightly little bit of a thriller to me. I’m a first-generation faculty scholar, the primary particular person in my household to earn a grasp’s diploma, and the one one who has constructed a profession within the arts and academia. I don’t assume I at all times knew that I needed to be an educator, however the indicators have been there. When I used to be a child, I might maintain Sunday lessons for my neighborhood buddies on my patio, the place we’d make artwork, do science experiments, and browse collectively.
Later, throughout my undergraduate and graduate schooling, the gaps in artwork schooling grew to become very clear to me. I skilled deep aggressions all through my schooling and noticed an absence of curiosity from some educators in studying help college students from totally different backgrounds. It typically felt as if we needed to mould and alter ourselves to be able to exist in these areas. I noticed this as one other hurdle I needed to needlessly survive to be able to pursue a life within the arts.
Thankfully, throughout graduate college, I had many alternatives to show. I felt that I used to be in a position to fill a number of the gaps I had skilled in images schooling, and I completely cherished it. I used to be obsessed. I like having the ability to be a part of my scholar’s artistic course of and having the ability to help their pursuits and goals.
I see my instructing and artwork observe as going hand in hand, and I don’t see one as extra vital than the opposite. Rather, every observe deeply influences, shapes, and strengthens the opposite.

©Lorena Molina, Tia Dinora en Catalina, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Sauquiot, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Kyle, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Corn Field, Biomaterials and images, 2026

ES: How would you describe your instructing philosophy and elegance?
LM: My creative observe, activism, and placement in society deeply affect how I perceive my function as a professor, artist, and group member. Academic establishments aren’t impartial, and their histories of exclusion, silencing, and oppression are nonetheless current. Part of my mission as a school member is to depart the establishment higher than I discovered it- to assist make it extra equitable and inclusive for everybody.
I imagine that being an artist is about greater than studying technical abilities. It is a manner of observing and actively collaborating in society. Art displays our values, our loyalties, and the way we perceive the world. From basis programs to superior undergraduate and graduate seminars, I ask college students questions that assist them determine what they care about and the way these commitments form their work. I would like college students to grasp that these values inform each alternative we make, each inside our creative practices and within the methods we transfer by means of the world.
For the previous twelve years, I’ve taught in each images and interdisciplinary artwork applications. Photography, to me, is thrilling, sophisticated, and one of the vital vital mediums of our time as a result of it’s embedded in nearly each side of our lives. But we additionally can’t deny the methods images has been used as a device of misrepresentation, imperialism, colonization, and racism. Many of my programs use this historical past as a place to begin for collectively imagining and establishing a unique future for the medium and for ourselves.
Issues of illustration, gender, sexuality, and race are deeply vital to me. I make it a precedence to show histories which were ignored or excluded and to introduce college students to artists and writers from a variety of backgrounds. By the tip of the semester, I would like college students to be curious and energetic members of society, to make work they genuinely care about, to grasp artwork manufacturing inside its social context, and to acknowledge that each creative alternative is political.
I would like my college students to be endlessly curious. Curiosity is central to my instructing philosophy as a result of I imagine it might maintain an extended creative observe. It can take somebody’s work in sudden and thrilling instructions. I would like college students to learn to ask significant questions and to see analysis as an important a part of their observe. I encourage play and experimentation with out treating what can historically be deemed “unsuccessful outcomes” as failures.  I imagine that it’s okay to be a newbie again and again. Society tends to reward mastery, however the stress to grasp one thing also can hold individuals from exploring new methods of constructing and considering and I actually imagine that making artwork is much more enjoyable this fashion.
I attempt to mannequin this curiosity at school discussions, particular person conferences, and critiques. When we interact with readings, I inform college students that I’m extra within the questions and ideas the textual content produces for them slightly than  listening to a abstract of the studying. This observe demonstrates that there are not any improper questions or solutions. And it reveals college students how thrilling and tough it’s to provide you with our personal questions and solutions which in the end builds group by means of the conversations within the classroom.
I imagine in nonhierarchical studying, the place we study from each other and make room for vulnerability. I let college students know that I don’t possess all of the solutions, however that I’m excited for us to attempt to determine issues out collectively. We convey this similar strategy into critiques. Students lead the conversations about their work and ask for the particular suggestions they should transfer ahead. I belief my college students as consultants on their very own work.
As vital as studying to ask questions is studying how and the place to seek for solutions. I encourage college students to consider analysis past its conventional scholarly kinds. Conversations might be analysis. Making and experimentation might be analysis. Listening, observing, and spending time with a group may also be analysis.
My instructing fashion is direct and trustworthy as a result of I imagine clear suggestions helps college students develop. I present up as authentically myself as a result of I really feel this creates the very best studying surroundings that enables them to be themselves as properly. I would like them to turn out to be talking and appearing topics of their very own tales, slightly than feeling that they need to make the form of work they assume an establishment or professor expects from them.
More than something, I would like college students to be excited concerning the work they’re making as a result of that pleasure is what retains them within the studio. My duty is to problem them whereas additionally supporting their concepts and serving to them perceive what these concepts want to be able to develop.
I additionally see collaboration as an vital ability for artists to study as a result of within the artwork world many people are at all times collaborating with different artists, curators and different group members for exhibitions, panel discussions, and group engagement. Art cohorts in undergrad and grad college are instrumental as a result of they aren’t solely the people who hold you sane and supply security and group, however they’re additionally the people who invite you to exhibitions, and different artwork alternatives. Students in my lessons collaborate with one another in exhibitions, writing, catalogues and different happenings in my programs. I’ve additionally been fortunate to collaborate with college students in previous private tasks, equivalent to Third Space Gallery and different tasks.
During the final three years, I’ve additionally explored totally different approaches to grading that help non-hierarchical and equitable fashions of studying. I would like college students to really feel company of their schooling and to grasp evaluation as a type of dialogue. This philosophy has led me to check and implement labor-based and contract grading techniques because the Spring of 2022, which encourage transparency and empower college students to take possession of their studying course of
Finally, I’m my college students’ primary fan. I’m at all times rooting for them, and I hope they will really feel that by means of the methods I help them through the semester and lengthy after our class or their time in class has ended.

ES: Did you’ve gotten an influential images mentor or instructor? What was their largest influence on you as each an artist and a instructor? 
LM: Academia has been an extended journey for me and, at instances, a tough place to exist. I don’t assume I might be the place I’m with out wonderful mentorship. I had three unbelievable professors and mentors: Mike Tsai and Roger Camp throughout my time at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, and Kristine Thompson throughout my time at Cal State Fullerton.
Mike was my introductory darkroom images professor. The class was deeply difficult, time-consuming, and costly, however he was additionally an intense and devoted professor who deeply cared about his college students. He made images so difficult and pleasing that the category utterly modified the trajectory of my life in artwork. He was at all times direct and trustworthy together with his suggestions in a manner that deeply influenced how I give suggestions to at the present time.
He was the primary particular person I talked to after I determined to modify from social work to artwork. He didn’t sugarcoat the profession or how tough it will be, however he advised me he would at all times help me. He taught me to belief my very own voice and never give in to stress from college who didn’t at all times have my greatest pursuits in thoughts. He was additionally a perfectionist, and I nonetheless hear his voice after I don’t wish to make one other print.
Roger was an incredible and beneficiant mentor. I used to be extraordinarily broke throughout my time as an undergraduate, and he would give me and others darkroom paper, rolls of movie, and cameras as a result of he knew how a lot use I might get out of them. He was a superb printer, and he was affected person and at all times gave me considerate suggestions on my work. I used to be so hungry for information, and I spent a lot of my time asking him questions on images.
Both Roger and Mike are a big a part of the rationale I used to be in a position to construct a profession in artwork, and I’ll endlessly be thankful for their steering and help. This was particularly vital as a result of I didn’t have examples of different individuals in my life residing the form of life I needed to reside. They confirmed me what was doable with a lot kindness, generosity, and endurance.
Kristine Thompson was my professor at Cal State Fullerton. She was a form and supportive professor who gave me a number of the greatest suggestions on my work. Kristine was the one who suggested me about graduate college, and her instructing fashion is one I deeply admire. I base numerous my very own instructing on the way in which she supported and challenged me.

ES: Your work explores video, set up, efficiency  and images, how do you share your success and your expertise as a multidisciplinary artist along with your college students?  
LM: I expose college students to a variety of artists working throughout totally different media. As an interdisciplinary artist, I’m additionally deeply accustomed to the methods up to date artists use interdisciplinary and multimedia practices of their work.
Art doesn’t reside in a bubble. Sociology, historical past, biology, anthropology, politics, literature, and different visible artwork kinds are consistently seeping into creative discourse. There are additionally fewer artists at present who work purely as painters, photographers, or inside a single medium. Artists are incorporating interdisciplinary and multimedia practices in thrilling methods, and I attempt to instill that pleasure in my college students from the start.
Because of this, lots of my lessons encourage multimedia and interdisciplinary practices, even on the foundational degree. My introductory programs typically embrace sound artwork, video, and efficiency as a result of typically it takes an project to offer a small push to college students past what they already know. How would they know that they get pleasure from combining sound with pictures in the event that they by no means have the chance to strive it?
I additional help this strategy by means of the artists I introduce at school. Many of the artists I embrace in shows and invite for lectures are increasing the chances of images, which helps college students perceive what else the medium is able to turning into.
Students are additionally often interested in what their professors are engaged on. They see me creating tasks that embrace micro organism, ecologies, video, efficiency, images, and set up. I believe it can be crucial for them to see that a creative observe can hold altering and increasing, and that they don’t have to restrict themselves to at least one materials, medium, or manner of working. If they ask, I share each my successes and the experimentation, uncertainty, and failures which can be a part of the method, as a result of these are sometimes the moments when the work grows essentially the most. I hope that by seeing my observe proceed to vary and broaden provides them permission to stay curious, and take dangers.
From an expert improvement perspective, each alternative I pursue in my very own creative profession, equivalent to exhibitions, grants, or collaborations, I create and consider methods of increasing these alternatives to immediately profit my college students. I invite college students to take part in exhibitions and performances, and I join them with curators, artists, and organizations I’m working with every time doable. I would like them to achieve actual expertise, construct relationships with different artists and organizations to additional join them to the Bay Area artwork group.

ES: What do you’re feeling is your most vital function as a instructor within the arts on this second of time? 
LM: I believe my most vital function as a instructor is to belief college students to allow them to belief themselves. I would like them to really feel that their concepts, experiences, instincts, and questions are legitimate,vital, thrilling, even when they’re nonetheless unsure about how greatest to articulate them. While at  the identical time, I attempt to help them to go deeper, to be extra intentional, and to attempt to perceive why they’re making the alternatives they’re making.
Students are additionally  residing by means of extremely turbulent, violent, and tough instances. Part of being an educator is knowing the context through which they’re making their work from. Those situations don’t remain exterior of the classroom, and don’t have an effect on all of them equally. I imagine that frequently difficult myself to see the larger image permits me to raised perceive and help every scholar extra individually.
I would like college students to learn to query what they’ve been taught and proceed to study, how pictures form what we imagine, and the way artwork can both help present techniques or interrupt them. That questioning should embrace me. Collectively, my college students and I work on totally different grading constructions, how they wish to be critiqued and what they’re essentially the most excited to find out about. I frequently attempt to create an area the place college students really feel comfy to problem me and maintain me accountable. They consistently change how and what I believe, and I study enormously from them.
Ultimately. I would like the classroom to be an area the place college students know they’ve the help from their professor and friends to do the work that strikes them. I would like all of us to stroll away from the category as totally different individuals from after we first set foot within the room; modified by the conversations and interactions we had in our pursuit to find out about their artwork observe.

©Lorena Molina, Tios, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Tia linda, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Mara, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Finca, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, Tia Maribel en los chorros, Biomaterials and images, 2026

©Lorena Molina, The barn, Biomaterials and images, 2026

ES: What are a number of the challenges that you simply face as a instructor within the arts? And what challenges do your college students face? 
LM: I might spend this complete article speaking about this query. Academic establishments have lengthy histories of exclusion, silencing, intimidation, and alienation, and so they proceed to carry on to these habits, whether or not overtly or in additional nuanced methods. Institutions typically have a false thought of the work they’re really doing, who that work helps, and who continues to be harmed by their constructions.
I’ve been introduced into establishments a number of instances as a result of they are saying they need the anti-colonial and decolonial work I do. But I typically rapidly notice that what they really need is for college of coloration to both remedy all of their issues or exist throughout the establishment with out really difficult it. They need range with out having to do the tough work of taking duty and altering their methods.
For DE&I work to be genuinely productive, it can’t be restricted purely to issues of illustration. Institutions typically have fun the presence of BIPOC college whereas resisting the very critiques, concepts, and structural adjustments that our presence could make doable. Diversity should additionally embrace a variety of concepts, views, and methods of working which can be allowed to query and problem how academia has traditionally operated and continues to function. Diversity can be too typically valued just for what it might do for the establishment, slightly than starting with the understanding that we should exist in these areas and to be supported, thought-about, and served with the identical care as all people else.
BIPOC college are sometimes introduced into violent and unstable environments as a rushed response to requires range and inclusion, with out placing the constructions in place for us to really feel absolutely supported within the work we do. Oftentimes, BIPOC college expertise excessive burnout and exhaustion because of these institutional failures. True decolonization of academia can’t be positioned on the shoulders of BIPOC college and college students. This just isn’t work we are able to or needs to be anticipated to do alone. It must be collective, intentional, and ongoing. The establishment has to already be genuinely dedicated to doing that work earlier than bringing us into the equation.
Sadly, these issues trickle all the way down to college students. I’ve seen college students go away artwork establishments deeply traumatized, feeling as if their views have been by no means supported or valued. Too typically, establishments anticipate college students to mould themselves to suit present techniques, even when it comes at the price of their genuine voices, life tales, and experiences. BIPOC college students are sometimes anticipated not solely to teach their friends, but in addition to teach college about their lived experiences. I imagine it needs to be the opposite manner round. Faculty and establishments ought to educate themselves and be prepared to vary and develop so they’re higher ready to help the scholars they at present serve and people they wish to serve.
It is our duty as college to mentor and help all college students. I particularly need BIPOC college students to really feel that they belong, that they’re listened to, cared for, valued, and seen. My largest hope is that educational establishments can turn out to be locations the place college students don’t merely learn to survive, however the place they’re really in a position to thrive.

ES: What’s subsequent for you as an artist? 
LM: I’m at present engaged on a mission at present titled “The fermenting Archive”  that thinks about archives, types of illustration, and the methods we move down information in additional alive and opaque methods. I’m utilizing micro organism and biomaterials, equivalent to vegetation, seeds, and different pure supplies tied to El Salvador and the totally different locations I’ve referred to as house. I’m combining pictures of my household and chosen kin in locations the place they really feel protected with pictures of different locations which were important in my very own life. I print or solid these pictures into bioplastics made out of these pure supplies, after which use micro organism collected from the websites the place the pictures have been made to create cultures, ferments, and archives of place and my family members. The micro organism collected from these websites combine with the microbes of the place the place I’m making the work, in addition to the microbes already current within the pure supplies themselves, making a layered microbial archive.
I’m deeply within the methods micro organism can move down information throughout generations, equivalent to by means of our intestine microbiomes. This feels particularly vital when colonization, battle, and displacement have destroyed conventional archives.
In this work, I’m working towards creating counter-archives that museums can’t accumulate. These works reject the polished aesthetics of the institutional archive and the spectacle so typically demanded of marginalized our bodies in artwork areas. Instead, the pictures turn out to be residing websites of collaboration between my family members, the microbes current within the work, and the pure supplies I take advantage of. In some methods, the method additionally permits me to launch management and let go of conventional concepts of authorship. The micro organism and supplies I’m working with have minds of their very own, and a part of the thrill is that they proceed to rework the work in methods I can’t absolutely predict or management. The work actually insists by itself timeline.
It has been actually enjoyable and difficult to find out about microbiology and chemistry by means of a means of fixed experimentation. Loads of the work begins with me asking, “What would happen if I mixed A, B, and C?” Then I do it and observe what occurs. I get pleasure from that means of studying by means of making, “failures”, and remark.

Last semester was extremely busy with exhibitions, so I’m excited to decelerate for some time and simply give attention to making and experimenting, and spending time with my college students within the classroom supporting their work.

STUDENT WORK

©Emmaline Carter, Here, the violents at all times develop, 2023

©Emmaline Carter, Untitled, 2025

©Emmaline Carter, On location and care set up picture, Index Gallery, University of Dayton, OH 2024

Lorena was my professor and mentor all through my undergraduate schooling, and I had the privilege of working as considered one of her artist assistants through the summer time of 2021. I actually can’t overstate the influence Lorena has had on my life. She approaches instructing with the utmost care and knowledge, difficult her college students to assume critically about their work and to contemplate the moral duties that include making pictures. She helped me discover the phrases to articulate my concepts and gave me the arrogance to belief them. She advocated for us every time we wanted her and cultivated areas the place we felt protected sufficient to experiment and be weak. The transformation I skilled in Lorena’s lessons continues to form the way in which I make work at present. I do know with certainty that I might not be the artist I’m at present with out her mentorship, and I really feel so fortunate that she continues to be part of my life.
Emmaline Carter
BFA University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning in 2022
Website: emmalinecarter.com
IG: @emmalinekncarter

©Jacinto Deleon, Apo, 2026

©Jacinto Deleon, Blindside

©Jacinto Deleon, Return house, 2023

Lorena Molina was my professor throughout my BFA program on the University of Houston and has continued to mentor me past academia. Countless phrases come to thoughts after I consider Lorena, but when there was a phrase, I see her as clairvoyant. Through her construction, curiosity, endurance, and generosity, she helped me turn out to be assured in trusting my very own convictions; encouraging me to strategy images not simply as a medium of image-making, however as a manner of investigating the histories, questions, and experiences that form how we perceive ourselves and the world round us. Lorena is such a outstanding educator not as a result of she brings out the very best in individuals, however as a result of she helps them acknowledge the elements of themselves they have been at all times able to turning into. She has a rare reward for revealing what’s already there, and at the same time as my observe continues to rework, her teachings stay a blueprint that’s gratefully held by means of my course of.
Jacinto Deleon
BFA 2025
Website: jacintodeleon.com
IG: @jaxiclez

©Leyla Rzayeva, Pit, 2026, plywood, archival pigment prints, ink, 24x48x68 inches

©Leyla Rzayeva, Surface, 2026, plywood, archival pigment print, 24x31x68 inches

©Leyla Rzayeva, Metal, 2026, copper wire, archival pigment print, plywood, 20×20 inches

With Lorena’s mentorship, whether or not writing or producing work, I’m answering to each eventuality that comes my manner as I step into the studio. Lorena has taught me to ask the vital questions in my work: What is my trajectory as an artist and what’s fueling that trajectory? She has been an indispensable mentor in serving to me discover that means and worth in what I observe and who I’m as an artist. She has demonstrated what it means to observe sustainably and profoundly, asking what’s the greatest work I can do within the present second. Working with Lorena, I’ve come to grasp my focus and what I must do every time I enter the studio, which is an immense reward of readability. 
Leyla Rzayeva,
MFA 2027 San Francisco State University
Website: rzayeva.com
IG: @ leylajamilrzayeva

©Jesse Ly, Filter Space – strive, take time – take time, strive – set up view 2026

©Jesse Ly, i witness, i Observe, i’m not, i’m, 2024

©Jesse Ly, Reach and Harness, 2026

I used to be fortunate to have been a scholar on the University of Cincinnati’s faculty of DAAP when Lorena Molina started her tenure there within the Photography space within the School of Art. I started working together with her from 2018-2020 as a scholar, and persistently from there since – she is somebody I actually look as much as as a mentor and risk mannequin. Lorena laid the groundwork for a large number of various methods I now strategy being an educator, an artist, and simply as an individual basically. One of essentially the most insightful qualities that I replicate on is her capacity to dually present up with a totally thought-about sense of directness and thoroughness whereas nonetheless holding area for tenderness and care in dialog, lectures and critiques.This extremely thought-about steadiness formed the framework of my beliefs in direction of the poise of help and effectiveness I now try for in my very own practices and processes. Beyond this she is an individual that concurrently invests in herself and her college students to instigate collaboration, curiosity, group, and care that really pushed and fostered an surroundings to assist me develop into the artist that I’m at present. I maintain a considerable amount of gratitude and appreciation for all the instances I’ve gotten to work together with her and nonetheless replicate on her steering typically.
Jesse Ly
BFA 2020
Website: jessely.com
IG @jessely

Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University and the founder and director of Third Space Gallery, a group area and gallery devoted to supporting and highlighting BIPOC artists. Third Space started in Cincinnati in 2022 and can open its new gallery area in San Francisco in Fall 2026

At the core of her work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed teams face in establishing place and establishing a way of belonging. The work is pushed by a deep sense of displacement skilled after a 12-year-old civil battle pressured her and her household emigrate to the United States. Most of her work stems from a necessity to seek out and construct group in a manner that it’s each tender, accountable, difficult by means of tough conversations that makes all people concerned actively query their place and privileges in society

She can be a founding member of Becoming Sticky, a collective with Central American artists Tesora Garcia and Martin Wannam. The collective examines Equatorial Vision and the way Central American artists make, think about, and flow into pictures by means of collaborative analysis, exhibitions, and public programming.

Molina  obtained her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Fullerton in 2012. Molina has been the recipient of quite a few awards and fellowships, together with being named a finalist for the 2026 SFMOMA SECA Art Award, the Diversity of Views Fellowship, the Christopher Cardozo Fellowship, two Truth and Reconciliation Grants from ArtsWave, Hot Picks by Smack Mellon, the Vacant to Vibrant Grant, the Fotofocus Exhibition Grant, The Idea Fund, the Artpace International Residency, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship.
Her work has been exhibited and carried out nationally and internationally, together with on the Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, Art League, Houston, Assembly Projects (Houston), Wave Pool Gallery, The Carnegie (Covington, KY), Vox Populi, FSU Museum of Fine Arts, EXPO Chicago, The Armory Show, The Rubin Center, SF Camerawork, The Berkeley Art Center, Root Division, The Beijing Film Academy, and throughout the piazzas of Florence, Italy.
Her work has been reviewed and featured in Hyperallergic, Glasstire, Eazel, The Wall Street Journal, The Careful Photograph with Tarrah Krajnak, Burnaway, Artillery, Ocula, Collector Daily, CAA Reviews, UnderMain, Movers and Makers, CityBeat, LENSCRATCH, Square Cylinder, AEQAI, Not Real Art, The Columbus Dispatch, BTW Berkshires, Latino News Network, Rice Thresher, The Daily Tar Heel, Syracuse New Times, The Daily Orange, the Document Journal, and amongst others.
Her curatorial work consists of Photography and Tenderness co-curated with Eliza Gregory at Wavepool Gallery, Flowers for Here at Third Space Gallery, Learning Curve on the Houston Center for Photography, On Belonging at Third Space Gallery, and gradual burn on the Fine Arts Gallery at SFSU.

Website: lorenamolina.com
Instagram: @thirdspacegallery.cincy
Exhibitions: 
Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue, a touring exhibition curated by Laura Augusta that has been touring for the previous two years, could have its ultimate presentation on the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University this August.
My work within the exhibition, For the Return, may even be proven at La Nueva Fábrica in Guatemala starting October 10.