Vanessa is a social practice artist and anthropologist primarily working with photography and video. She has worked in the US and Ecuador around issues of identity, belonging and migration.
She explores the potential of belonging in a context where the boundaries between categories of nationality, culture, race, ethnicity and gender are being pushed, inhabited and reshaped. By looking into the mobility of those borders, she hopes to explore the infinite potential humans have to diferenciar-nos (differentiate between each other) as the same infinite potential humans have para pertenecer-nos (belong to one another).
During her fellowship she started a collaborative project with the Ecuadorian community in New Haven. It attempts to create a portrait of “Sucua Haven”. This is the name used by the community to define this territory due to the fact that most of the population of Ecuadorians is from Sucua, a city in the Amazon region. She believes that one inhabits a space not only with the materiality of the bodies but with cosmologies, dreams, and fears. Terán uses practices from photography and anthropology to explore and register both the metaphysics of space as well as the experiences of inhabiting it.
Terán is currently a selected fellow for ICSI Summer Seminar 2023 at the New School. She is the head of the audiovisual department at the digital media platform GK since 2021. As part of Fluxus Foto Collective, she was granted the National Geographic Emergency Fund to develop a collective work on education inequality during the pandemic of Covid19 in 2020.
In 2018 she received the emerging artist grant from More Art to develop Runa LLakta, a project with the Kichwa community in the north east of the US with organizations like Kichwa Hatari, Sarusa and Ecuallakta. Part of this collaborative work was shown in the Native Cinema Showcase at The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and the Andina University in Quito. It was included "Emerging Challenges" a group show organized by the VI Congress of la Asociación Latinoamericana de Antropología (ALA), was also part of group shows in the John David Mooney Gallery in Chicago and in HERE in NY.
Since 2016, Terán has collaborated with the Native and the Refugee project with the production of “Bedouins of Jericho” and “Indian Winter”. These works have been featured in Vice Arabia, Newlines Magazine, and Fast Company and shown in Film Festivals like EDOCS, CLACPI, Ficmayab.
She holds a BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts (US) and Masters in Visual Anthropology from Flacso (EC).