Juliana Cerqueira Leite

Juliana Cerqueira Leite was born in Chicago in 1981 and lives and works in Brooklyn. 

Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s practice brings together sculpture, drawing, movement, film, and photography, while exploring ideas deeply rooted in materiality. The artist challenges the traditional hierarchy between mind and body, considering the body as an active material capable of producing meaning. Her work explores the poetry of bodies in motion through time and space, a long creative process that transforms an everyday gesture into an abstract sculptural form. Each stage of the making process is carried out by the artist herself, allowing the work to evolve like a living organism. From the figurative elements present in her film Labor (2024) to her metal sculptures gradually covered with layers of material, she moves away from representation to examine the repetitive gestures associated with industrial labor. Her biomorphic forms, with their curved lines and sensual volumes, explore the relationship between material and space. 

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Leite developed a series of drawings and sculptures that extended her research into movement, abstraction, and the history of modernity. She presented a new body of work based on her 16mm film Labor , which examines the memory of industrial gestures through movements reenacted by former assembly-line workers. Inspired by the research of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, this project creates a dialogue between photography, cinema, and the mechanization of labor.