# Panmela Castro

Panmela Castro (Rio de Janeiro, 26 June 1981) is a Brazilian artist and activist. Her artwork aims to “address the relations established with her life experience and questions about the other's body in dialogue with her own.” She is considered by O Globo as one of the most prominent artists in Brazilian contemporary art.

## Biography

Panmela was born and raised in the neighborhood of Penha, Rio de Janeiro. She obtained a Bachelor's in Painting from the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Master's in Contemporary Artistic Processes from the Institute of Arts of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her art is influenced by issues related to corporeality and the dialogue with the city.
Panmela, who calls herself a mixed-race woman in Brazil, was raised as a white girl by her conservative lower-middle-class family in Penha, Rio de Janeiro.
Her mother Mrs. Elizabeth faced a series of financial difficulties and experienced some episodes of domestic violence with her first husband until she decided to run away and marry another man, who provided her with a more dignified life and raised Panmela as a daughter. However, when she turned 15, her new father declared bankruptcy. It was at this age that the artist, still very young, had to work to help with household expenses.

## First Steps

In a destabilized family environment, Panmela abandoned her parents' house and decided to live in Manguinhos, known as one of the most dangerous favelas in the city. While in Manguinhos, she drew people on the street and charged the people portrayed one real per drawing.
Panmela adopted the pseudonym Anarkia Boladona while participating in the carioca graffiti movement.
In 2005, Panmela was beaten and kept in unlawful confinement. From then on the paintings were kept on murals, where she could express the traumatic experience of domestic violence. She came to understand graffiti as a form of denunciation. This story reverberates to this day in her canvases and performances.

## Performance

In parallel with graffiti, the artist (who has already adopted her civil name as an artistic name) began, in her works, to provoke and polemicize with the street and with the established truths of patriarchy, especially in relation to the female body, sexuality, and subjectivity, analyzing power relations.
Her first public performance, on 7 July 2015, took place at Eva's opening exhibition. In 2016, she presented her two sequential performances: Why? at the Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea, where she walked with a huge pink dress and scratched across her chest with a razor the word Why?, and Imitação da Rosa, where she invited the public to walk through The Republic Museum in a Siamese dress.

## Paintings

After a long period in graffiti and performance, Panmela Castro revisits her childhood and youth memories. In her current paintings, Panmela addresses issues from her daily life, as seen in the series Purge, memories as presented in the series Missing Home and even issues of neglect, acceptance and structural racism, as intimately exposed in the series Women of Color Don't Receive Flowers.

## Cultural impact and accomplishments

In March 2010 Panmela Castro was awarded The DVF Award for being an extraordinary women fighting for change for women's rights.
In 2013, she was listed as one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders.
Panmela Castro has also been nominated as one of the 150 women who have shaken the world by Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Castro has been acknowledged worldwide through her efforts to advocate for women's rights.
She formed Rede Nami, an urban network where female urban artist raises awareness of gender inequality through public art, graffiti, and workshops in Rio. Rede Nami also provides workshops in Brazil for women and girls, teaching them about domestic violence and teaching them about graffiti art.
Today, Panmela promotes hers mission in different parts of the world by sharing its vision through lectures, exhibitions, and workshops, at festivals, forums, and conferences - from the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the Ayara Family, Manifesto Festival, FASE and Caramundo. In addition to producing murals and exhibiting in several countries, she has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Hutúz Award for graffiti artist of the decade in 2009 and the Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards in the human rights category, thus joining the group of honorees such as Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, women's anti-trafficking pioneer Somaly Mam, Nobel laureate Laureate Muhammad Yunus, and US Secretary Hillary Clinton. In 2012 she was honored by the Diller Von Furstenberg Family Foundation with the DVF Awards of the famous fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg along with other women such as Oprah Winfrey, she entered the list of Newsweek Magazine as one of the 150 women who are "shaking" in the world and in 2017 was named in W Magazine list of 18 names of new generation activists who are making a difference.