Rea (pron. RAY-uh) Lynn de Guzman is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator. She works in painting, print, and sculpture. Her work explores psychological and socio-political themes surrounding liminal identity, cultural assimilation, and the Filipinx diaspora, tempered by her experience as a Filipina immigrant living in the United States. In her work, she delves into oxymoronic concepts of assimilation and repudiation, reductive and additive, permanence and temporality, and the complicit relationship between colonizer and colonized.
Born in Manila, Philippines, de Guzman immigrated to the United States at age 14. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited work throughout the US, and internationally in Australia, India, and the Philippines. She is a recipient of the API Artist Futures Fund award in 2022. In 2019-2023, she curated the Wander Woman Series — featuring Bay Area-based, women of color artists with immigrant backgrounds. She has been featured in the Asian Journal Magazine, Hella Pinay, KQED Arts, NBC Bay Area, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications.
She is currently the Senior Manager of Educational Programs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has taught art at: City College of San Francisco Continuing Education, de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco Center for the Book, and Root Division, where she served as the organization’s first Filipina Teaching Artist Fellow in 2017. She lives and works in the Bay Area.