María Esther, Camila Lobón Named Cuban Migrant Arts Resilience Fellows
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Two Cuban cartoonist, illustrators: Mary Esther Lemus and Camila Ramírez Lobón, are two of the ten recipients of the Cuban Migrant Arts Resilience Fellowship by the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC). The fellowship supports exiled Cuban artists with a financial grant, mentorship, and networking to help artists rebuilding their professional lives abroad. This is ARC’s third year hosting the fellowship.
María Esther Lemus Cordero is a visual artist, illustrator, and comic artist, born in Havana in 1990. She holds a degree in Sculpture from the Eduardo Abela Academy of Fine Arts in San Antonio de los Baños, Artemisa, Cuba. In 2019, she was a founding member of xel2, a Cuban graphic-humor weekly platform promoted by elTOQUE, where she explored political and social satire until its forced closure in 2022. She has held several solo exhibitions and participated in more than thirty group exhibitions in Cuba, the United States, and France. Her work has been published in various journalistic outlets such as elTOQUE and Cubanet, as well as in cultural magazines and collective books including Soñar La Habana(2014), Habana Made in Cuba (2016), and 75 Years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Views from Cuba(2023), among others. From a critical perspective, her practice addresses Cuban and international current affairs through humor and satire. She currently lives in exile.
Her work as a visual artist focuses on illustrating a political imaginary that subverts the Cuban totalitarian narrative. She graduated from the University of the Arts (ISA) in Havana in 2019. Her solo exhibitions include Epizootia (Zapata Gallery, Miami, 2024) and El país perdido (Aveces Art Space, Havana, 2019). Her work has been exhibited in New York, Montreal, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Kassel, and Prague. She was the General Coordinator of INSTAR, the Hannah Arendt Institute of Activism, and an active member of independent civic projects that have led the fight for freedom of expression and political and cultural rights in Cuba in recent years, such as the 27N group, the San Isidro Movement, and the Ánima collective. She was a columnist for Hypermedia Magazine and currently writes a graphic column for the cultural magazine Rialta. She currently resides in the United States.
The other recipients include:
- Ahmel Echevarría Peré, Narrator, art and literary critic
- Eliexer Márquez Duany “El Funky”, rapper and activist
- Fernando Fraguela Fosado, independent filmmaker, editor, and producer
- Ismario Rodríguez Pérez, journalist and documentary filmmaker
- Julio Llopiz-Casal, visual artist and graphic designer
- Katherine Bisquet Rodríguez, writer and activist
- Luis Alejandro Yero, filmmaker
- Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, art historian, communicator, and curator
ARC is a non-profit organization that “defends and advances the right to artistic freedom, providing practical resources and support to artists and cultural workers, so they can live and work safely, free from fear.”
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