Asenath Lizárraga (b. 1991) is a Peruvian American visual artist raised in Washington state, and currently based in Olympia, WA. Their multidisciplinary art practice and curiosity of the natural world led them to the Evergreen State College where they graduated with dual degrees, a BA and a BS. Asenath primarily works in printmaking and oil painting, using symbolism and detailed overlapping scenes to convey stories exploring cultural connections to nature, mythology, ancestry, and dream spaces in between the surreal and reality. They’re passionate about creating art that captures the beauty of Latin American culture, and that emphasizes the many points of cultural unity that exist across this vast continent that they have ancestral ties to. While living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they worked as a studio and program manager at OFFCenter Community Arts Project, where they created a DIY screen printing studio. Simultaneously they organized with a free childcare collective and other grassroots community organizations advocating for social justice. At an artist residency in Mexico in 2024 at La Ceiba Gráfica they explored the process of stone lithography for the first time and produced a series of prints. They are a recipient of Artist Trust’s 2025 Grants for Artist Projects.

I am a multidisciplinary artist, specializing in printmaking and oil painting, whose work aims to link cultural and spiritual memory from a Latin American diasporic perspective.
My subject matter is built upon my direct experience as well as years of historical research. I have watched the displacement, environmental destruction, resource extraction and cultural genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas grow more acute throughout my lifetime, and seen its effects both in the loss of knowledge and tradition and the endangerment and marginalization of immigrants throughout the diaspora. As a child of a Peruvian immigrant, I have devoted many years working within the migrant community, mentoring youth and aiming to reflect their experiences relative to my own. As an artist, my experience compels me to use and cherish all that I’ve been left with from my ancestors, reconnect to their traditions, and honor the realities of our separate and shared loss and grief.
My art aims to maintain the connections linking immigrants to our ancestral homelands and cultures, and to inspire reflection, understanding and healing. Building off of research into pre-Columbian Indigenous history from across the continent, I re-imagine elements of Peruvian/Andean and Indigenous folk art in a contemporary, anti-colonial feminist and queer context, and explore how individuals and communities interact with memory in regards to healing both recent and intergenerational traumas.
A formative moment in my practice was receiving the Gilman Scholarship while studying at The Evergreen State College, which allowed me to study evolutionary biology in Ecuador and Peru. While there, I met some of my Peruvian family for the first time and made a pilgrimage to the Andean village where my grandmother was born. Having the opportunity to visit and study in the land of my ancestors was an immense honor, and connected my academic pursuits to my personal interests in a way I had never experienced growing up so separate from my Peruvian roots.
In 2024, I had the opportunity to study lithography at La Ceiba Gráfica in Veracruz, Mexico. Studying and making art outside of a colonial context taught me so much about the immigrant diaspora on this continent and the immensity of our shared experiences and perspectives. From a technical perspective, I fell in love with lithography because of the dedication and precision required to produce a print completely by hand.
The lithographic process greatly influences my approach to oil painting, which has become my primary medium since returning to the US. I have developed a new appreciation of layering, and returned to older pieces to add new details and light dynamics using the skills I developed at La Ceiba. I look forward to the opportunity to build stronger relationships with my future pieces, guiding the evolution of each work with hours of research and honoring the role of time in the conceptual, procedural and creative process.