BELLA CARDIM
Bio
Bella Cardim is a Brazilian visual artist from Rio de Janeiro, based in Miami. After nearly two decades working as a commercial food photographer in Brazil, she shifted her practice toward contemporary art, expanding from photography into installation, textiles, sculpture, text, and participatory forms.
Her work examines the intersections of food, body, and culture, exploring how affection, memory, identity, inheritance, and control are transmitted through domestic rituals and become imprinted on the body.
Cardim holds an MFA from Miami International University of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited in Brazil and the United States. She received the Miami Individual Artist Grant in 2025 and the Director’s Choice Award at Art Fluent’s ConTEXT II in 2023. She is a resident artist at Laundromat Art Space in Miami and a member of Grupo Corpo e Cultura, a research group in Brazil dedicated to studying how culture shapes the body’s relationship with food.
Artist Statement
My life has always revolved around food.
The flavors, gestures, and emotional and social rituals around the table have always intrigued me. From an early age, I felt the pressure to eat in order to belong. Food was affection, reward, and proof of love. But it was also control, discipline, and guilt. These contradictions shaped my relationship with food and, later, with my body.
For almost two decades, I worked as a commercial food photographer in Brazil, creating images designed to stimulate desire. During that time, I began to recognize that behind the aesthetics of food were layers of conflict, restraint, and expectation. Gradually, my gaze shifted from the plate to the body, from the surface to the structures surrounding it. Food became not only something to contemplate, but a language carrying inheritance, emotion, and social codes.
My practice investigates eating as a cultural, emotional, and political act. I am interested in how food carries systems of belonging, guilt, desire, and discipline. Through food, we learn how to behave, how to restrain ourselves, and how to desire within permitted limits. These lessons reveal invisible rules that shape our bodies, emotions, and relationships.
My research begins with personal experience and expands toward collective dynamics: the persistence of beauty myths, the moralization of eating, the medicalization of appetite, and the subtle mandates imprinted on the body. Working across photography, installation, textiles, sculpture, text, and participatory forms, I use familiar objects and materials such as recipes, plates, measuring tapes, scales, fabric, and handwritten language.
Repetition, embroidery, handwriting, accumulation, and participation operate as ways of exposing and resisting inherited narratives. They make visible the instructions transmitted through families, media, and institutions, and the ways these instructions are absorbed by the body and repeated around the table.
Food is the point of departure. What I ultimately examine are the structures that feed us, shape us, and try to control us.
Press
