Diana Guerra (b. 1989) is a Peruvian American lens-based artist and educator based in New York. Her work explores themes of memory, belonging, and identity (re)construction within the LatinX diaspora, particularly from a woman of color navigating displacement. She questions how immigrants mourn the loss of their identities and reconstruct them in a new land, examining whether this transformation follows a linear or cyclical process. By merging conventional and alternative photographic techniques, Guerra creates a ‘third space’—a realm where personal and collective histories intersect.

Her ongoing series, Fleeting Under Light, explores the fragile nature of memory and migration, drawing from her personal archive and collaborative photography with family members in La Arena, Peru, and New York since 2018. The project employs anthotype, an alternative photographic process that uses photosensitive materials derived from plants—specifically Peruvian purple corn, beet, and red cabbage—to create images that fade over time when exposed to sunlight. This intentional impermanence mirrors the instability of memory and the immigrant experience. The use of purple corn, a sacred crop in Andean culture, evokes ancestral connections and the displaced homelands that migrants carry with them.

Guerra’s artistic process prioritizes both creation and community engagement, turning personal narratives into a collective practice that empowers immigrant communities while challenging dominant cultural narratives. By performing these light exposures in the United States, her work inscribes a history of resilience, reclaiming indigenous and Latine identities often overlooked in mainstream discourse.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, Mana Contemporary, Photoville, Der Greif in Berlin, PH21 Gallery in Budapest, and Espacio Cavallero in Buenos Aires, among others. She has received the AIM Bronx Museum Fellowship, the SPCUNY Faculty Fellowship (2024), and the En Foco Photography Fellowship (2022). She has also been an artist-in-residence at Hangar in Lisbon and the Wassaic Project in New York. Guerra holds an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from the City College of New York and a BA in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

Through experimental processes, personal archives, and collaborative artmaking, Guerra’s work preserves fading histories, resists cultural erasure, and asserts the role of Latinx immigrants in shaping contemporary American identity.