Carina Vargas-Nuñez is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles, and sculpture to explore identity, disability, and family history. From a young age, Carina has used art to process their experiences with disability and imagine worlds beyond the constraints of complex health challenges. This practice of worldbuilding remains central to their work today, where vibrant colors, defined lines, and symbolic imagery bring personal and inherited narratives to life. Drawing from their family’s migration from Cuba, their experience of queerness, and the cultural mythologies and spiritual traditions that have shaped their upbringing, Carina constructs layered worlds that explore memory, belonging, and the formation of identity. Influenced by magical realism, their work brings together the real and the imagined, creating space for multiple histories, experiences, and ways of knowing to coexist. Carina is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.