Stefano Castro explores themes of family, immigration, and transience across lens based media, including photography, filmmaking, and digital art. Within his practice, the family portrait functions as a way to visualize the tension between loss and preservation, both material and immaterial, within diasporic experience. This approach is rooted in his mother’s devotion to documenting and archiving their family history after migrating to the United States from Colombia. Her clear and attentive gaze, paired with oral histories and folklore shared while revisiting physical photographs, informs his ongoing investigation into the space between identities, life and death, and the real and the inexplicable. As his practice expands, Castro situates his photographs within this purgatorial space, where cinematic and photographic strategies engage the archive to produce a magical realist reading of emotional memory, social structures, and cultural spirituality within immigrant communities.
Castro earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 2021, studying Film Studies and Integrated Design, Engineering, and Applied Sciences. In 2022, he received a National Geographic Young Explorer Grant to develop an educational, community based program focused on preserving and advancing Latin American history through the arts. Working with local high school students and community members in his hometown, he helped establish Englewood, New Jersey’s first Latin American archive using donated photographs and student artwork. He lives and works between New York and New Jersey, where he serves as a registrar and event photographer at the Institute for Studies of Latin American Art.
