
Ilana Savdie
Brooklyn, NY
Ilana Savdie (b.1986) was raised between Barranquilla, Colombia, and Miami, Florida, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Drawing from the history of abstraction, folklore, human anatomy, horror, and pop culture, Savdie’s work considers how power structures can be resisted, transgressed, and dismantled. Savdie received an MFA from the Yale University School of Art and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She participated in the 2022 Emerging Artist Residency Program at Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles, and was a fellow in the NXTHVN Fellowship Program in New Haven. The artist has also been the subject of solo exhibitions, including Radical Contractions at The Whitney Museum of American Art (2023), In Jest at White Cube, London (2022); and Entrañadas at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). The artist’s work is represented in prominent museum collections, including Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Jewish Museum in New York, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Rachofsky Collection in Dallas, the Burger Collection in Hong Kong and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Ilana Savdie, Baths of Synovia, 2023. Oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel. Photographer: Lance Brewer
Ilana Savdie, Paper Planes, 2024. Oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel. Photographer: Lance Brewer
Ilana Savdie, Pico y Placa, 2024. Oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel. Photographer: Lance Brewer
Ilana Savdie, Like the Devil’s Sick of Sin, 2024. Oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel. Photographer: Lance Brewer
Festejeros
Ilana Savdie (b. 1986) was raised between Barranquilla, Colombia, and Miami, Florida, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Artist BioWith Festejeros, Ilana Savdie will examine the mixed origins of carnivals in the Americas and Caribbean. At the core of Savdie’s research is a desire to better understand how histories are translated through folklore and how that continues to offer modes of disruption. In her work, Savdie often draws on her experience of the Carnaval de Barranquilla in Colombia, where she grew up; a space in which abundance, inversion, the grotesque and the perverse serve as collective protest to oppressive social and political regimes. Savdie is interested in the way these modes of resistance through spectacle collide with historical retellings, revealing an underlying emotional truth.
Savdie hopes to expand her research beyond her lived experience to encompass the broader historical context that led to the festivals in the Americas and the Caribbean today. Savdie expects the work to take form in the process as she, a person of colliding identities, will be spectator, gatherer, and participant. Savdie will document this research as a long-form video piece, which would be exhibited as an installation alongside paintings and sculptures that integrate the gathered references.
For Festejeros, Savdie will begin working with the performers, scholars, and organizers of the Carnaval de Barranquilla, and branch out from there to explore other carnivals, religious festivals and historical reenactments, accumulating an embodied understanding of the impact of cultural translations.