Julianna Sanromán Rojas

Julianna Sanromán Rojas is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist based in Detroit, working across painting, installation, and community-based ritual practices. She earned her BFA in Art Practice from the College for Creative Studies, where she received the Imre J. Molnar Artistic Achievement Award, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design. Her practice begins with separation and the question of how we remain in relationship with people and places we cannot physically reach. Drawing from her family's experiences between Mexico and the United States, her work examines migration, deportation, forced family separation, postmemory, and the ways political borders become intimate experiences carried through the body. Alongside painting, Sanromán Rojas creates ephemeral floor installations using hand-dyed rice, informed by traditions of temporary carpet-making in Mexico. Through painting and collective ritual, she considers how inherited histories can be transformed rather than simply preserved, asking what survives distance and what we choose to carry forward.

Her work has been exhibited in Detroit and internationally at MOCAD, The Scarab Club, Detroit Artists Market, Galerie Camille, Playground Detroit, and Gallery Omnibus in Dresden, Germany. Her solo exhibitions include What Lived and Died Between Us at Playground Detroit and My Mother Is a Border | I Return To, presented following her 2026 residency at Casa Lu Sur in Mexico City. Sanromán Rojas has been grateful to receive support through opportunities including the Playground Detroit Emerging Artist Fellowship, Modern Ancient Brown Foundation Post-Baccalaureate Residency, Visionary Resistance Fellowship, and Casa Lu Sur Residency. Her practice has also contributed to international research addressing deportation through a collaboration involving Nagoya University and the Japanese government. Across these experiences, she continues to understand art as a way of making space for memory, presence, and connection and of imagining how we might build lives beyond the systems and borders that separate us.