Karla Lagunas (MFA 2025) is a painter, performer, and writer. She determines her medium by connecting threads unraveled through earnest research. Her performance work examines intersections of gender, race, immigration, class, and neurodiversity. She employs these themes in her visual art by using dialectics and metaphor in subject and through material. Her paintings activate portraiture into reactive installations, pushing painting to a sculptural realm, exploring the limits of art objects. A Las Vegas native, Lagunas’ work has shown in a range of local exhibition spaces from Clark County galleries to obscure Mojave landscapes. In 2020, she exhibited works for the national show SKIN IN THE GAME at Palos Verdes Art Center, California. In 2021, her work was included in Future Relics at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. She performs experimental collaborative work for local theater companies and is co-organizer of the non-hierarchical performance art event RADAR. As a writer, her art criticism has been published in the Desert Companion. She holds a BA in Art and Art History from UNLV.