Karla Claudio

Karla Claudio (they/she) is a Boricua visual artist, documentary filmmaker and educator based in Lajas, Puerto Rico. They lead an arts and ecology itinerant lab called La Recolecta dedicated to ethnobotanical research on local wild flora for food, medicine and craft. They collect and share this knowledge through community workshops, zines and documentaries. Their last short film “La nueva ola de añil / The New Indigo Wave” (2024) was an official selection at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, 2025 Santa Fe International Film Festival, and featured in Season 8 of PBS POV Shorts. Their short films about Taíno potter Alice Chéveres and her family – la masa (2021), piedra viva, piedra muerta (2021), and la reseña de Cuquito (2021) – were featured in the group exhibition El momento del yagrumo at the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021. Their videos and experiments with natural pigments and dyes have been featured at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Design Museum of Miramar, Kadist San Francisco, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, among others. They are currently producing their first feature film, Matininó, a hybrid documentary directed by Gabriela Arp and supported by Topic Studios, Doc Society, Sundance Film Institute and Ford Foundation. They were recently selected as a 2024 Sundance Latinx Fellow. Recently, in June 2025, they participated in a two-month artist residency at the Vila Sur Goethe-Institut at Salvador de Bahía, Brazil.