Clarissa Tossin: Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture

Clarissa Tossin is the 2025-26 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil and Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She works with moving-image, sculpture, and installation to propose alternative narratives for places defined by histories of colonization. Through a mix of research, storytelling, and gestures of mapping and layering, Tossin places seemingly disparate elements into conversation, generating unexpected moments of interconnectedness across time and space. Tossin’s childhood in Brasília heavily influenced her early films and installations deconstructing Brazil’s modernist history, which over the years has expanded to encompass geographies ranging from her adopted home of Los Angeles to the vast realms of outer space. She was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and in “Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home,” in New Orleans. As the Freund Fellow, she will teach in the College of Art and develop her work in preparation for an exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum next year.