Kenia Almaraz Murillo

Biography

Kenia Almaraz Murillo (born 1994 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia) is a Bolivian-French textile artist based in Paris whose contemporary wall-mounted sculptures reimagine traditional weaving as a language of memory and identity. She moved from Bolivia to Paris around age eleven to join her older sister, an early rupture that continues to shape her work's exploration of familial legacy, Andean mythology, and diasporic experience. While pursuing her formal art studies, culminating in a degree from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2020 with distinction, she also trained in traditional basse-lisse tapestry weaving under artist Simone Prouvé, grounding her practice in centuries-old textile techniques even as she pushes them into new sculptural and painterly territory. Almaraz Murillo's tapestries integrate weaving traditions from indigenous South American cultures with an urban, contemporary sensibility, resulting in vividly colored works that reference both Andean cosmology and her adopted life in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including Waddington Custot in London and Dubai, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, Sobering Galerie in Paris, and Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, and she was a finalist for the Prix Her Art, presented by Marie Claire and Art Paris in support of women in the arts. Continuing to live and work between her Bolivian roots and Parisian training, she remains a leading voice in the contemporary revival of textile and fiber art.