Mayara Ferrão

n.Salvador, BA (1993)

Mayara Ferrão (Salvador, 1993) is a visual artist graduated from the Federal University of Bahia. Her work spans photography, illustration, painting, creative direction and stage design, incorporating image technologies, artificial intelligence and video to create shared narratives of Black, Indigenous, and dissident bodies.

Her work has participated in group exhibitions such as Ancestral Futures at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Histórias LGBTQIA+ at MASP, Ancestral: Afro Americas – United States and Brazil at the Museum of Brazilian Art at FAAP, Memórias Habitadas at SESC-RJ, Inomináveis Presenças at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, Raízes: começo, meio e começo at the National Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture, Women House Amsterdam at NDSM FUSE, Cuir Sou: notas sobre afetividade at Verve, Carvões Acesos at Galeria Galatea, and Corpo Tangente in Recife.

In 2025, she held her first solo exhibition, o primeiro rastro foi água, at Galeria Verve – a development that followed her 2024 participation in the residency program at Pivô Arte e Pesquisa in Salvador and the publication of her essay Álbum de Desesquecimentos in Revista ZUM. Her work has been recently incorporated into the permanent collections of the São Paulo Museum of Art and the Aloisio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art.

"It is (...) by confronting the inescapable nature of loss and absence that Ferrão's work does not seem to aim at filling irreparable gaps, but rather at offering glimpses and flashes of what could have been entire lives—free, beautiful, and loved—like someone who wishes to offer a loving and immaterial restitution to ancestral lives (...)."

Fernanda Silva e Sousa

"In a context where the racist bias of AI systems is widely debated, with algorithms mostly coded by white men, Ferrão is not alone in appropriating a technology that was not designed for or by Black people."

Fernanda Silva e Sousa

"Mayara Ferrão seems to tell us that it is time to rest our feet and contemplate scenes of love that we were not even capable of imagining."

Fernanda Silva e Sousa

"Ferrão has been dedicated to an investigation that combines archival research on slavery with the manipulation and generation of images through AI. Her aim, she explains, is to construct fictional narratives of affectionate exchanges between Black women and to reimagine colonial representations through a speculative exercise that seeks to ask: What if these women had been able to live their loves in the past? However, the very question finds a bold response in her work: these women did live and love, but their loves became unimaginable in a world shaped by cis-heteronormative white supremacy."

Fernanda Silva e Sousa