Xavier Robles Armas

Xavier Robles Armas is a multidisciplinary scholar, artist, and curator with a focus on itinerant performance practices, public space, photography, and how migration shapes architecture and subject-hood in the U.S. He most recently held the position of Events and Arts Manager at The Latinx Project, where he curated Tinkuy: Converging Ecologies (2023), co-curated Escenas (2025) and RicanVisions (2025). A recent Independent Curators International Curatorial Seminar graduate and NALAC Leadership Institute Fellow (2024), Xavier has also been part of the inaugural cohort of Latinx curators in the A&L Berg Foundation’s Early Stage Arts Professionals program. Independently he has organized and collaborated on curatorial projects with EnFoco Inc., Pregones/PRTT, ProArts Oakland and Heaven Gallery Chicago. He has held fellowships at the Queens Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Xavier holds an MA in Performance Studies at NYU, holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Architectural Studies from Hampshire College. He will be attending Brown University in the Fall to pursue a PhD in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Xavier lives in Queens, New York—by way of Santa Ana, California.

Project Title: Passing through: Light and Air in Arlene Mejorado's photography

Project Description: As a political strategy I turn towards the elemental as a way to engage with Los Angeles based artists Arlene Mejorado’s lens-based practices. In a way this turn interjects the hegemonic power that renders a photography final and rather invites us to engage with other aspects that get sticky within the medium. By unearthing the hidden or not so obvious ways of understanding a photograph I develop a call towards the elemental as a way to further dig deeper into images and further claim that images are unstable and they are theatrical and in motion. 

Mejorado developed the photographic series titled, a landscape holds you still through a close listening of familial oral histories. An active participant in her photography, Mejorado, in her words, “works through staging intimate gestures, marking space with memory and constructing rehearsals in remembering.” Born and raised in the backdrop of the San Fernando Valley, Mejorado constructs what Lisa Cartwright calls a topography of feeling through her series of images. She scouts and goes back to familiar locations to stage intimate moments for contemplation. To borrow from Una Chaudhuri, Mejorado works alongside the city to not only politicize space but to reclaim the public sphere to articulate an undoing of self. This undoing is alongside the elemental in which she so closely pays attention to. What does it mean to be uncontained and move with the elements as a subject always already in motion?