Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Installation, video, digital art
Website: miguelnovelo.com
Miguel Novelo was born in 1992 on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. He began his art education in Madrid, earning an associate degree from the Escuela Universitaria TAI in 2013 as a recipient of the Fundación Pablo García scholarship, and in 2015 co-founded the Campeche Film Festival, the region’s first competitive film festival. He moved to San Francisco to complete a BFA in Filmmaking, with a minor in Art & Technology, at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, and later earned an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2022.
In 2018, alongside Andrea Boettiger and Alejandro Coba, he co-founded Futuro Sureste, a multidisciplinary collective proposing visions for the future of the Yucatán Peninsula through dialogue among researchers, artists, and community members. He now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches as a lecturer in Stanford’s Art & Art History Department (Experimental Media Arts) and is a program affiliate at Symbolic Systems, in addition to teaching in the CADRE program at San José State University and in the Design program at California College of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and at international film festivals including Morelia and Sheffield Doc/Fest. In 2026 he presented INFRAMUNDO, his first institutional solo exhibition, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, and completed an Artist in Residence term at Recology San Francisco.
Novelo works across algorithmic video, interactive installation, and game-engine environments, drawing on Maya cosmovision, cybernetics, and what he calls “technoshamanism” to bridge landscape, culture, and emerging technology. Recurring motifs include cenotes, coconuts, and other elements of Yucatán geology and mythology, reimagined through generative software, motion sensors, webcams, and AI systems that respond in real time to viewers’ presence.
His installations frequently ask visitors to participate directly — speaking into a sculpture, standing before a camera, or triggering a generative video sequence — collapsing the distance between ritual and interface. The resulting works read simultaneously as ecological elegy and speculative technology, using glitch, looping video, and 3D-printed or photogrammetric forms to ask how Indigenous knowledge systems and computational media might inform one another.
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