Arianna Mercado

Biography

I am a cultural worker and locate my practice across exhibitions, writing, and teaching. I have worked as a curator, coordinator, and editor on projects with institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, Afterall Research Centre, and the British Council, among others. In 2025, I was co-editor of How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000 (Afterall, co-edited with Wing Chan and David Morris).

My curatorial and research practice explores ideas around terrain, threading inquiries into ecologies and infrastructure with the social and affective. In 2018, I co-founded kiat kiat projects, a nomadic curatorial initiative. I have previously participated in residencies at the Singapore Art Museum, Areté Sandbox, and Koganecho Bazaar, as well as workshops with Para Site Hong Kong and Vargas Museum.

I was a recipient of the 2017 Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Awards in Art Criticism. My writing has been published by Archives of Women, Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, and Ocula. At present, I teach as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman and as Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of Fine Arts, School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University.

Arianna Mercado, Independent Curator and Senior Lecturer Department of Theory at The College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines, has been awarded by Fernando Zobel de Ayala (Manila, Philippines).