Diane Machado
MFA ’25 Fine Arts 2D
As a first-generation Azorean-Portuguese American, I exist in the third space, in-between—old and new world, immigrant and non-immigrant, marginalized and liberated—the same, but not quite, other.
I create my art from archival research, artifacts, and collective memory to reframe identity and representation within a visual paradigm of fragmented histories and colonial legacies in the Azores and that of my diaspora experience in the United States.
My recent installation titled, Agonias—what we can’t speak of, is a word that Azorean-Portuguese women use among themselves to describe their anxiety that remains untranslatable to English. This body of work uses my prints, shelves, and artifacts to interrogate a larger, concurrent context of anxiety about belonging and nationalism.
Ultimately, I reclaim resourcefulness and resilience in the careful collection of my immigrant and diasporic experience that speaks to visibility when there’s an ongoing erasure of identity and representation.
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Diane Machado is a Somerville-based, first-generation Azorean Portuguese American artist. Her multidisciplinary practice spans archival research, printmaking, and installation. Machado reframes her diaspora experience as neither here nor there to resist cultural hegemony. Machado earned a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from the University of New Hampshire and later studied graphic design at MassArt. Returning to her studio practice in 2017, she honed green printmaking techniques and is a member of Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, MA. Machado is a recipient of MCC and LCC grants, and her work has been exhibited in New England.
