Alexandro Segade

Associate Professor

Website

http://www.alexandrosegade.net

Biography

Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist exploring speculative group identities at the intersection of politics and fantasy, through projects in performance, video, writing, and drawing.

Segade’s art collective, My Barbarian, a long-standing collaboration with artists Malik Gaines and Jade Gordon, employs theatricality and humor to critique social and historical situations. In 2021, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a survey of twenty years of My Barbarian’s hybrid art-theater-music production, an immersive exhibition which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022). My Barbarian’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among other major institutions. My Barbarian’s monograph, co-edited by Segade, Gaines, Gordon and curator Adrienne Edwards, was published by the Whitney Museum and Yale University Press. The group’s recent exhibition, Cat Suit, which featured a Tarot deck designed by Segade, was presented at the gallery Lubov, NYC in 2025-6.

Outside of the collective, some of Segade’s notable works include: Star Choir (2023-2024), a feature-length sci-fi opera, which tells the story of a starship crew seeking refuge on a hostile planet, mounted at the historic Mount Wilson Observatory, the film of which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; The Context (2020), a graphic novel written and drawn by Segade, published by Primary Information, which reinterprets the superhero genre as a queer parable, using characters named for concepts from critical theory; and Anoche (2025), a short film that explores Cuban cabaret and was shot in Havana, in the neighborhood where Oscar Segade, the artist's grandfather, was born. This short film premiered during the 15th Havana Biennial and was the subject of a video installation at Beta Local, Puerto Rico (2026). Segade’s multimedia science fiction performance series, including Future St., Boy Band Audition and Replicant VS. Separatist, were presented at the Park Avenue Armory, Judson Church, NYC; Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College; Time-Based Art Festival, Portland, Oregon; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; and LAXART, REDCAT, the Broad Museum in LA.

Segade's writing on Comics Studies, Performance Art, Queer Art, and Latinx representation in Visual Art, has been published in Artforum, Yale Theater Journal, Broadcast, ASAP, as well as various catalogs and scholarly publications. Segade has received support from the Creative Capital Grant, US Artists, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Mike Kelly Foundation, and is a MacDowell fellow. Segade is an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Segade has a BA in English (with an emphasis on Elizabethan theater) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art, both at UCLA, where he studied under the tutelage of artists Mary Kelly and Andrea Fraser. He was born in San Diego, California.

Segade’s research areas include Performance Art, Video Art, Queer Art, Latinx and Caribbean Art, Experimental Film, Writing for Camera, Contemporary Art Theory, Exhibition Design, Comics Studies, Surrealism and Science-Fiction.