Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. Their work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics and the meanings we make from bodily adornment. As an oral historian, their focus is on the intersection of tattooing and the prison industrial complex and on archiving the narratives of queer and trans tattoo elders. They have worked with the Rikers Public Memory Project and with the National Public Housing Museum as part of their inaugural Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History. They are author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press). Santibañez's work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, Selenas Mountain, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Cheech at the Riverside Art Museum, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, and in performance at MoMA PS1, among others. In 2019 Santibañez was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City and was a recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. They received their BFA from Pratt Institute in Printmaking and their MA in Oral History from Columbia University, and were awarded OHMA’s Future Voices Fellowship for 2021.