As a many-times immigrant whose family has navigated multiple migrations, I investigate how diaspora severs our natural connections and how we reconstruct identity when separated from our origins. Working across drawing, printmaking, photography, and material intervention, I build each piece through layers: adding and subtracting material in a process that mirrors how identity itself is constructed. Scanning and enlarging these layered works creates a journey from micro to macro world, revealing details invisible at their original scale.

I work with materials that hold contradictions. Vinyl becomes second skin. Silicone forms teardrops or water, yet also evokes the plastic that pollutes it, simultaneously protective and contaminating. Hair functions as a biological cable connecting us to thought, and as the element that helps purify polluted waters. Like language itself, we carry these materials across borders: sometimes pure, sometimes contaminated by what we carry and what carries us.

Throughout 40+ years of studio practice, I've explored these ideas through varied investigations. I've rearranged hair on skin surfaces to examine human relations and identity, explored psychological shadow and transformation through hair and the gaze, and created work about our reciprocal relationship with water (how we meditate on it and care for it in return for the nourishment and healing it provides). Migration fractures our connection to ancestral knowledge, recipes, rituals, ways of being passed through generations. When we're separated from ritual community, we must purify ourselves. When thought-cables are cut, we turn to technology. When languages drown like migrants in crossing waters, we become the vessels that carry them forward.

Current projects include Let Me Tell You Something, an artist book preserving my grandmother's Eastern European recipes, illustrated with Yiddish phrases I learned from her, an endangered language that traveled from Romania to Peru before World War II. Her recipes occasionally weave in Quechua phrases, evidence of her own transculturation in Peru. The book gathers histories of ingredients that traveled across continents, embodying the contradiction of constant migration itself: languages dilute and disappear even as we struggle to preserve them.

Floating Territories stretches my ongoing investigation about the traces we leave on the planet due to our industrial evolution. For this series, I gather photographs of glaciers and rivers, and once printed, I work on them by drawing and printing images of animals endangered due to climate change and plastic pollution, and adding messages in Braille and Morse code either embossing the surface or using confetti made of upcycled plastic water bottles.

I add three-dimensional elements to surfaces to create opportunities for tactile engagement and direct encounter between material and viewer.

Rosemarie Gleiser Blufstein, 2026
Fulbright Fellow, Ph.D.
Born in Peru, practiced across Colombia, Spain, and the United States.