Milagros de la Torre is an artist whose work examines the image, its vocabulary and language, mostly through an autobiographical lens. Her work is conceptually layered and often questions established systems of representation and meaning. She has studied Communications Sciences at the University of Lima as well as received a B.A. (Hons) in Photographic Arts from the University of the Arts London. Her first solo exhibition Under the Black Sun (1993), curated by Robert Delpire, was presented at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and in 1995, she worked as a curatorial assistant in the Photography Department at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris.
She received the Rockefeller Foundation Artist Grant and was awarded the Romeo Martinez Photography Prize and the Young Ibero-American Creators Prize for her series The Lost Steps (1998).
De la Torre was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), The Dora Maar Fellowship (2014), The Peter S. Reed Foundation Award in Photography (2016) and was the recipient of a Merited Person of Culture medal from the Ministry of Culture in Peru (2016), the Sustainable Arts Foundation Residency Grant (2020), Hundred Heroines (2021) and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship Award (2021). She was named the Wolf Chair in Photography (Fall 2023) at The Cooper Union, NY. She has mentored, served as dissertation advisor, and taught broadly.
De la Torre serves at the Board of the Penumbra Foundation, NY, a non-profit organization that brings together the Art and Science of Photography through education, research, public and residency programs.
She has held artist residencies at the The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; NYU Tisch School of the Arts; Artpace, San Antonio, curated by Monica Espinel. She has given artist lectures at Columbia University; The Getty Research Institute; University of London; The International Center of Photography; The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Parsons, The New School; The School of Visual Arts; The SMFA, Tufts University; Carnegie Mellon University; Hunter College; The Americas Society; El Museo del Barrio; Penumbra Foundation; Scripps College; Syracuse University; Phoenix Art Museum; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico; Center for Contemporary Studies, University of Barcelona; Museo de Arte de Lima, MALBA Museum, Argentina and a keynote lecture at CSU, San Bernardino, California, among others. De la Torre’s work is part of the MIT Student Lending Art Program from their permanent collection, and it is also part of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, ICAA, Documents of Latin American and Latino Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Her work has been exhibited extensively and is part of permanent museum collections including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Yale University, New Haven; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The RISD Museum, Providence; Ruby City, The Linda Pace Foundation, Texas; Diane and Bruce Halle Collection, Phoenix; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Molaa Museum of Latin American Art, California; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, U.K.; Universidad de Salamanca, Spain; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico; Museo de Arte de Lima, MALI, Peru; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina; MALBA Museum, Argentina.
De la Torre's work has been reviewed by Art in America, The New Yorker, ARTFORUM, Frieze Magazine, ARTnews, Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, TIME Magazine, Public Radio International, Broadly, Beaux Arts Magazine, Jeu de Paume Magazine, EXIT Magazine, ArtNexus, Arte al Día, Atlantica Journal.
She lives and works in New York.