Hera Santos

My practice engages questions of identity, trauma, and marginalisation through a transdisciplinary approach spanning visual art, performance and socially engaged work. As a trans-femme artist, I draw on lived experience to examine how systemic structures, medical, political, architectural, and ecological regulate and mark the body. Personal experience functions as a method for tracing how power is inscribed, administered, and resisted.

Working with visual work, performance, sound, video and installation, I re-stage trauma through processes of ritual, role-play, and embodied methodologies such as Photo-Therapy, movement, voice, and spatial intervention. These practices allow for forms of repair, re-authorship, and embodied agency to emerge. Across my work, I challenge fixed ideas of gender, naturalism, and authorship, foregrounding self-representation as both a political strategy and a practice of care.

My recent works include Ugly Duck – Follow Y/our River (2025), Chemist Gallery - Architectures of Failure (2025), The Ruins of HER(A) (2025), and I’m Made of This Earth (2025), published by F WORD MAGAZINE. These works position the trans body in relation to river systems, institutional architectures, ancient ruins, and soil. Across these projects, land and built space function as collaborators, archives, and witnesses.

I was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on 19 September 1995. I grew up in Portugal and trained in performing arts at the Escola Profissional de Teatro de Cascais. In 2018, shortly after being diagnosed HIV+, I moved to London. These experiences of migration, diagnosis, and transition continue to shape both my life and practice, grounding my work in lived knowledge.

Alongside my artistic practice, I facilitate workshops at the intersection of identity, wellbeing, and social change, developing creative and embodied approaches primarily with people living with HIV. I have delivered workshops with organisations including Whitworth and Positive East. I also maintain ongoing collaborations with Paula Roush and Delaine Le Bas, engaging in shared research, performance, and socially engaged projects.