b. 1985, Merida Yucatan, Mexico.
Priscilla Dobler Dzul is an interdisciplinary storyteller. Her paintings, textile, and sculptural works address notions of belonging, borders, alienation, and social inequality. Dobler Dzul’s works examine the migration of cultural practices and forms between different social and political contexts, with an emphasis on the recuperation of artisanal craft and the articulation of alternative narratives of labor, power, and design.
Her practice addresses two dominant themes: the exploitation of minority communities and the recovery and reimagining of indigenous myths and stories. Dobler Dzul’s ebullient canvases depict expansive landscapes featuring a range of hybrid animals, human figures, and plant life. These invented worlds teem with dreamlike visions, sensual pleasures, collisions of different life forms and genders—yet many of these tableaux nonetheless bristle with an undercurrent of darkness: brutality, violence, death, and turbulent transformations. Her highly glazed clay sculptures, inspired by the bold colors and forms of Mayan mythological oral stories and Alebrije folk art, introduce fantastical creatures who live between worlds—between the ancient and contemporary, animal and human.
Her work has recently been exhibited at Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ; A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Consulate of Mexico, Seattle, WA; The Northwest African American Museum, Seattle, WA; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; 125 Maiden Lane, NYC, NY; Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA; King Street Station, Seattle, WA; The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA and Decentered Gallery, Puebla, Mexico. Dobler Dzul was additionally a 2014 recipient of Grants for Artist Projects from the Artist Trust, 2015 Bailey Award, 2016 Edwin T. Pratt Scholarship, 2017 & 2021 Tacoma Artist Initiative Program Grantee, 2021 Puffin Foundation Awardee and a Robert B McMillen Fellowship. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2013.