Kay Zevallos Villegas, known as KAY, is a Peruvian transdisciplinary artist, stage director, and researcher. She lives and works between Paris, France, and Iquitos, Peru. Initially trained in dance and anthropology, she develops her artistic practice through collaborative processes with communities in the Peruvian Amazon and migrant communities. Through performance, sculpture, and other visual languages, she explores the relationships between matter, memory, territory, and ritual. Zevallos Villegas grew up in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, and is of Quechua heritage. Her work emerges from the oral memories, popular beliefs, legends, and rituals that shaped her childhood, examining the continuity of violence against women, vulnerable communities, and Amazonian territories, as well as the postcolonial historical processes that continue to shape bodies, landscapes, and ways of life. Her practice draws on materials from the Amazon and other tropical regions—including fish scales, industrial latex, seeds, collected objects, and offerings—whose histories have been shaped by processes of extraction, circulation, exchange, and stigmatization, connected to the movement of materials, commodities, and people. Her work has been presented at institutions including the Grand Palais and the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (France); the National Gallery in Prague (Czech Republic); the Wifredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art (Cuba); the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Spain); and MAC Lima (Peru), among others. She has also participated in the Prague Quadrennial (2023), the Havana Biennial (2024), and the Pavilion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the Venice Biennale (2024). In 2025, she was nominated for the Prix COAL.
Kay Zevallos’ residency at El Espacio 23 is presented in partnership with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA).
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