About Me
 

I am a storyteller. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert near the U.S.–Mexico border. Over the course of my life, I have witnessed the transformation of the border from a permeable and friendly crossing into an increasingly militarized and surveilled zone. I have seen communities shaped by immigration policy, environmental destruction, and economic instability by design. My lived experience, along with being a child of a feminist who took me with her as the “youngest member of her women’s group” starting at age of four (back in the 1970’s in Tucson), have deeply informed my understanding of the shifting power dynamics in this country, and throughout the world. It is through sharing our stories and decolonizing our systems of representation—political, legal, and narrative, and embedded programming — that we are able to reshape a world towards empowerment for those who have experienced erasure and persecution. This applies to all of us. We deserve lives in which it is safe to have boundaries, to root ourselves firmly in identities that were previously destabilized, and to put an end to normalizing suffering and conflict.

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My art work, which has run the gamut in material and expression from two dimensional painting and drawing, to installation, assemblage, writing, and film, has been guided by questions that I now seek to explore further: how does my story as expressed through views of the world, humanity, self, and nature, relate to systems of power embedded in patriarchy and colonialism?

 

What have I internalized as beliefs, identity, and embodied patterns, and how might shifts in narrative and representation contribute to psychological and collective liberation? I am particularly interested in the role of decolonization through cultural, cognitive, and somatic restructuring. I am focused on understanding the power of transformation of inherited narratives that shape how individuals understand their worth, agency, and relationship to the world.

Across these domains, my art has moved through observation of the spaces between branches and the story that tells to an expression through visual narrative about the intersection of grief, loss, beauty, mental health, and the world. My work seeks to further process not just my story, but my understanding of how structural forces—migration, poverty, environmental stress, and systemic inequality by design —are internalized at the level of the nervous system, identity formation, and belief.

 

These embodied patterns, often rooted in historical and intergenerational trauma and nervous system programming, reflect the intimate dimensions of larger cultural and political systems. In this sense, colonization and patriarchy operate not only through external control, but through the shaping of perception, self-concept, and emotional regulation. In my next series of work I intend to deepen and clarify the illustration of how these internalized structures are produced, maintained, and potentially transformed through an understanding of our collective history.

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Philosophically and creatively, I am drawn to traditions that destabilize fixed notions of reality and identity. The ideas of transformation and perception, in which the boundary between dream and waking life becomes uncertain, resonate with my ongoing interest in layered realities and the instability of what we call “the real.” . I am not old, but I feel old. I am old, but I don’t know it. 

• Susannah Thomas Castro, 3/25/2026