Cara Romero

In a photographic practice that blends documentary and commercial aesthetics, Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe) creates stories that draw from intertribal knowledge to expose the fissures and fusions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and futurity.

Romero’s solo and two-person exhibitions include her first major institutional survey, Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light), Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH (2025) and Phoenix Art Museum, AZ (2026); Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past, Figge Art Museum, Davenport IA (2025) and additional venues; The Artist Speaks: Cara Romero, Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art, CA (2024); and Indigenous Futurisms, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2023). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY (2025); The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2023–24); Our Selves: Photographs by Women Photographers, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and Water Memories, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (both 2022).

Romero’s public art projects include #TONGVALAND presented in Los Angeles by NDN Collective (2021); Restoration: Now or Never with Save Art Space in London (2020), and Desert X in the Coachella Valley (2019). Widely collected, Romero’s photographs are in private and public collections including those at the Denver Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. 

Romero was raised between the rural Chemehuevi reservation in California’s Mojave Desert and the urban sprawl of Houston. She is based in Santa Fe. 

www.cararomerophotography.com