Stephanie LaBruna
Step into the Bronx Museum and you will find an emotional landscape built from metal, glass, and fragmented time. CRT monitors glow atop metal stands, their colorful cables physically mapping the complexities of diasporic memory. Faced with a lack of surviving photographs from her mother’s childhood in rural Peru, Diana Guerra—a Peruvian American lens-based artist and City College alumna—had to build her own archive by sourcing a 1960s German educational film about a young rural Peruvian girl. This culminating work of the 2024 AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum weaves those found images together with new, intimate footage shot in collaboration with her family, reconstructing a visual history of her family’s erased heritage.
Before the archive, Guerra was studying the frameworks of society itself as an undergraduate at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. That sociological grounding never left her practice; it keeps her work rooted in questions of power, colonization, and the deliberate erasure of indigenous archives. After building a portfolio and completing a year at Parsons School of Design, the need for a more expansive, interdisciplinary space led her to CCNY’s Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice (DIAP) MFA program, where she graduated in 2020—the same institution where she would later return to teach.
Today, Guerra has traded her seat in the DIAP program for a desk at the front of the room. Returning to CCNY in 2022 as an adjunct professor in the photography department brought an unexpected weight. Teaching, she quickly realized, requires profound pedagogical and emotional labor—the content itself is only the beginning. The real work is social and interpersonal: making students feel seen, challenged, and safe enough to take risks. It was a humbling discovery of how much a good professor actually carries.
In her classroom, the primary rule is freedom. She actively works to dismantle the paralyzing expectation of perfection, reminding students that experimentation is precisely where the magic happens. Rather than dictating their process, she wants them to take ownership of their education and feel secure enough to make mistakes without fear. In return, the energy of the classroom feeds her own creative pulse.
For the next generation of CCNY artists sitting where she once sat, her advice is simple but demanding: trust yourself. Embrace the messy process of experimentation, but understand that growth requires deep discipline and hard work. The studio is only part of it—showing up, putting the work in front of people, building the relationships that carry it further—that labor is its own practice, as essential as anything made behind closed doors. For Guerra, it is advice she has lived: from a sociology classroom in Lima, to the emotional landscape now glowing in the Bronx.
You can view Diana Guerra’s installation at the Bronx Museum as part of the AIM Fellowship exhibition. To stay updated on her latest work—including photography, collaborative filmmaking and social practice projects—visit her website and follow her journey on Instagram.