Paola Mendoza: 2026 Artist in Residence

Launched in 2023, JusticeAid’s Artist in Residence program deepens our commitment to the joyful connection between justice and art. Each year, we invite a talented artist to collaborate with us, creating original work that reflects JusticeAid’s mission, our annual justice pillar, and the goals of our grantee partner. Past Artists in Residence are Paine the Poet and Ìsa Blues. We are thrilled to introduce our 2026 Artist in Residence Paola Mendoza, who will appear at our Spring benefit concert, Rhythm Nation, and other occasions throughout the year.

Meet Paola

Paola Mendoza is a Colombian-born multi-media artist, filmmaker, author, and cultural organizer whose storytelling drives her audiences toward a relentless demand for change. Mendoza uses art to disrupt and disarm, to change our thinking, and to advance movements for immigrants, women, and reproductive justice. Her artistry defies classification in any one genre—spanning written, visual, film, and musical forms. Grounded in an immigrant perspective, her work exposes the violence embedded in borders and systems of power.

Paola Mendoza was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She came to the U.S. as an infant with her mother and brother, where they struggled and were homeless for a short period until her mother obtained a job at a fast food restaurant. At the age of twelve, Mendoza became involved with a gang. In order to get her out of the gang situation, Mendoza’s mother sent her to live with her aunt in Columbia, where she remained until returning to Los Angeles for her senior year of high school. After Mendoza attended community college for three years, she graduated from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, and earned her master’s degree at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a co-founder of The Soze Agency, a creative social impact company, and The Meteor, a media company for feminist work. Paola is a Pop Culture Collaborative Gender Justice Fellow, a Race Forward Fellow, an Opportunity Agenda Fellow, and a Pop Culture: Becoming America Fellow. She was named Glamour’s Woman of the Year in 2017 and one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Watch the Instagram video.

Performance Art

Last year, on the steps of the Statue of Liberty, Mendoza organized 50 people for A Cry for Freedom, a visual protest against the the government’s violation of due process for 238 men sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) mega-prison in El Salvador. The title draws from a group of asylum-seeking women who, after months in detention under abhorrent conditions, organized their own llanto de libertad—a cry for freedom.

Calling out the names of the 238 men one by one, followed by a collective wail, Mendoza created her own cry for freedom—transforming grief into protest and protest into art, and reclaiming public space as a site of memory, denunciation, and a refusal to surrender.

Photos by Kisha Bari.
Public Art Installations
Immigrants Are Essential

Immigrants Are Essential, created in 2021 in SoHo, honors the lives of Fedelina, Mario, Moisés, Yimel, Juan, Ofelia, and Guadalupe—seven undocumented New Yorkers whose stories reflect the experiences of countless others too often unseen. Through illustrated portraits drawn from family photographs, Mendoza centers their humanity, resilience, and the sacrifices they made to build better futures for their families. Read their stories.

The project—named for a campaign spearheaded by the National Immigration Law Center and Resilience Force—included a QR code linking to oral histories shared by loved ones. Together, the installation challenges viewers to see beyond labor and status, recognizing undocumented immigrants as integral members of our communities while underscoring the urgent need for more just and humane immigration policies.

Rosa’s Miracle

In 2018, Rosa set out with her four children, joining more than 7,000 people walking from Honduras to the U.S. southern border. They crossed deserts, mountains, and rivers as the world watched. Rosa’s Miracle retells her story through striking images rooted in dignity and celebration. Mendoza recreated the images at bus stop shelters in New York City to honor the miracles of working immigrant mothers and to urge their children to go and vote.

Writing

Mendoza’s writings include two young adult books and essays published by Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, among others…

Sanctuary
It’s 2032, and in this near-future America, all citizens are chipped and everyone is tracked–from buses to grocery stores. It’s almost impossible to survive as an undocumented immigrant, but that’s exactly what sixteen-year-old Vali is doing. She and her family have carved out a stable, happy life in small-town Vermont, but when Vali’s mother’s counterfeit chip starts malfunctioning and the Deportation Forces raid their town, they are forced to flee.

SOLIS
This haunting near-future companion tale to Sanctuary tells the story of undocumented immigrants subjected to deadly experiments in a government labor camp and the four courageous rebels who set into place a daring plan to liberate them.

Together We Rise
On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, more than three million people took to the streets for the Women’s March—the largest single-day protest in modern American history. Published for the march’s one-year anniversary, Together We Rise chronicles this extraordinary uprising through the voices of its organizers, including co-founder Mendoza. Their reflections offer an inside look at how the idea began, grew into a global movement that surpassed their wildest expectations, and continues to channel the outrage and determination that sparked it.

The Women’s March

In response to the rhetoric and policy concerns surrounding Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March emerged as a global call for equity, justice, and human rights. As co-founder and artistic director, Paola Mendoza played a key role in shaping and mobilizing the march, which brought an estimated 4.5 to 5 million people into the streets worldwide on January 21, 2017. With more than 650 marches across the United States alone, it became the largest single-day protest in U.S. history—an outpouring of resistance and solidarity that surpassed organizers’ wildest expectations and continues to resonate today.

Music

Mendoza is a co-founder of The Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of more than 60 womxn who join together to breathe joy and song into the resistance.

Founded in the wake of the 2017 Women’s March, the chorus strives to center women in music and address how historically marginalized women have been in the music industry. The critically acclaimed groupd is active at protests, rallies, and vigils, and also holds regular shows where political organizers and special guests fortify the group’s size and power. They have performed at several JusticeAid public forums.

Filmmaking

Mendoza’s films tackle the complex issues of poverty and immigration and their impact on women and children in the United States. She is currently directing a feature-length documentary about domestic workers.

Romina is an animated short film that tells the true story of a 14-year-old girl facing an unplanned pregnancy in a state where abortion is banned. Despite the legal barriers, a community rallies around her, ensuring she can access the abortion she desires.

Sophie Cruz became an Internet sensation in 2015 when Pope Francis visited our nation’s capital. Five years old at the time, she dodged the Pope’s security to deliver a letter imploring him to help undocumented immigrants. Free Like the Birds is the story of Sophie as she fights an unjust immigration system to protect her undocumented parents.

A mother (Jamie-Lynn Sigler, The Sopranos) and her three-year-old daughter (Heaven King, The Ellen Show) giggle and dance to their favorite song on the radio. A chance encounter with a police officer changes the course of their lives forever. A Broken Tail Light shatters the life of a mother and her child.

Newly arrived in New York City and deserted by her husband, Mariana must find a way for herself and her two children to survive their first summer in the United States.

Civil Disobedience

In June 2018, Mendoza organized a group of children on Capitol Hill to demand an end to child separation from their families on the southern U.S. border. As creative director, she titled the work, I Am a Child, drawing inspiration from the 1968 “I Am a Man” campaign, including Ernest Withers’ photograph of striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Photos by Kate Sullivan/CNN, Win McNamee/Getty Images, and Kisha Bari.
Art Installation

In May 2019, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy, Mendoza placed Family Separation, a life-size installation of a caged child on the Capitol lawn in Washington, DC. The installation was a searing reminder to our nation’s leaders that hundreds of children still remained forcibly separated from their parents.