Irasema Asenet Fernández Reyes

Born in Mexico City/Mexico in 1990.

Irasema Fernández is a writer, visual artist and activist. She studied Hispanic literature and languages at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her work explores narratives about the female body in its political, colonial and cultural contexts.

As an author, she writes essays, novels and short stories and her work has been published in several literary anthologies and magazines. She is the recipient of fellowships in Novel Writing (2021) and Short Story Writing (2018) from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts.

Her work as a visual artist is diverse, ranging from oil paintings and murals to graphic design. Her current project The Macedonian Machine: Learning From Bots, is a series of oil paintings that imitate AI-generated images based on text prompts related to police violence and state crimes in Mexico during the last sixty years. She is also currently working on a street art project, entitled Mobile Narratives, that aims to create safe public spaces through pieces inviting debate on gender violence, sexual abuse, police abuse, machismo, racism and beauty mandates on non-hegemonic bodies. She was invited by the Hay Festival Querétaro/Mexico to give a Master Class on how urban art and public protest are keys to effective community building and cross-cultural dialogue in direct relation to this project in 2020.

Much of Fernández’ artistic work is intrinsically politically motivated, and she has been recognized for both her artistic inventions and her activism. In collaboration with other activists, she received the Respond and Vision Fund of Avina Americas, Washingten, DC/US (2021) for the project Against Institutional Machista Violence: Demanding Information, Prevention and Reparations for Sexual Crimes Committed by Police Officers against Women, Trans and Non-Binary People. She has also been invited to give workshops for Amnesty International and Casa Hogar Paola Buen Rostro, a shelter for trans women.