Berenice Badillo is a Spanish-speaking, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, illustrator, muralist, and multimedia artist. She is an immigrant from Mexico and has found herself straddling intertwined cultural and subcultural identities her entire life. She illustrated an award-winning book “Am I Blue or am I Green?” that explores the identity and impact of a boy’s life with parents that are undocumented in the United States. Badillo strives to document and encourage the creation of communal cultural wealth through murals, sculpture, pop up art galleries and in the co-creation of counter stories. She believes that there is an importance in representation and sees art expression as a means to both amplify the voices of BIPOC and disseminate the stories of their community where it can be witnessed on a grand scale. Badillo is a Chicano Park muralist, has a doctorate in Art Therapy, and is a social emotional learning consultant (SEL).
Mural progress 2023 on mural cloth. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Living Cultures Grant
2023
Mural in Chican@ Park 2024
In 1997, Badillo created a forty-foot mural in defiance of Caltrans’ proposed retrofitting, which threatened to destroy the murals in Chicano Park in San Diego. Badillo plans to restore the now historic landmark mural and create a short documentary to highlight Chicana women muralists and the mural’s history and symbolism.
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