Helena De Bragança

Helena De Bragança is a photo and video artist residing in NYC. She published her book “I Am Cuban” in 2011 where she jumped through a portal into underground subcultures in Cuba with her Leica. Desiring to deepen her conceptual practice, De Bragança was granted a merit scholarship and enrolled into the MFA photography program at Parsons. She began collecting poems and writing from her late father, Manuel De Bragança, with the intention of getting closer to the core of his being as she did not grow up with him and did not meet him until she was 20. Opening the pandora’s box unveiled many mysteries and De Bragança blended imagery of her children with revelations in his writing. As the pandemic descended upon the World, De Bragança found herself roaming barren, rural land in Vermont with her children scouring the Earth for meaning. De Bragança’s work often blends documentary, mythologies, surrealist narratives and performance sometimes with her collaborator and friend, Danniel Swatosh. Swatosh and De Bragança’s consciousness collide which ignite images of reflections, merging of nature and animals, the mother, spiritual guides and voices, burrowing deep into the Earth’s abyss and lifting up into the brightest eyes within the dark clouds.