Lia Chavez is an interdisciplinary artist and philosopher whose work treats the human body not as subject alone, but as a living threshold—an instrument through which consciousness, matter, and the sacred pass into form. Widely regarded for advancing human consciousness itself as an artistic material, Chavez positions the creative subject as both medium and generative force. At the intersection of ritual technology, scientific inquiry, and embodied perception, her practice asks how awareness produces form—how art becomes less an object than an event of presence, a site where encounter replaces representation.
Educated at University of Oxford and Goldsmiths, University of London, Chavez’s doctoral research engaged the phenomenology of perception developed by Henri Bergson, with sustained attention to duration, consciousness, and integrative intelligence. These ideas remain embedded in her work, which unfolds through light, temporality, and the porous boundary between material experience and immaterial presence.
Initiated within Christian, Himalayan, Andean, Egyptian, and Mayan contemplative traditions, Chavez conceives installations, performances, and sculptural environments as contemporary ritual architectures—spaces in which perception is reorganized and transcendence becomes experiential rather than symbolic. Her works operate as perceptual laboratories, inviting participants into altered states of attention where body, space, and awareness converge.
Parallel to her artistic practice, Chavez has collaborated with neuroscientists investigating creative inspiration, with research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Tate, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, situating her practice within both experimental research and contemporary art discourse.
Through Hildegaard, her luxury house devoted to sacred embodiment, Chavez develops projects that weave ecology, ritual, and beauty into new models of cultural production rooted in reverence and sensory intelligence. She has contributed to global conversations on art and consciousness through keynote engagements at the The Wall Street Journal Future of Everything Festival and the Creative Time Summit.
Chavez lives and works in the Yucatán jungle, where her practice unfolds in continuous dialogue with landscape, ceremony, and what she understands as divine intelligence—sustaining art as a living interface between heaven and earth, perception and presence, becoming and form.
