Mariquita Davis

Biography

Mariquita “Micki” Davis (familian "Pilele", Dådi yan Gadas, tao tao Hågat, Guåhan) is a Chamoru artist, educator and the co-founder of Pilele Projects based in Los Angeles.

She received her MFA from the University of California San Diego in 2011. Her work explores notions of artistic collaboration in the contexts of personal, familial, and communal memory. She is a participating artist for the MALI’E performance research project, a 13-moon series of creative development workshops that unites a cohort of culturally rooted Matao/CHamoru artists in the homeland and in the diaspora to produce a traveling exhibit between Guåhan, Los Angeles, and Seattle. She is the co-curator of Pasifika Transmissions, a monthly learning series that invites Indigenous artists to visit the archive of the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum of Long Beach and develop a video “transmission” of this exchange. She joined the community of Visual Communications in 2012 when she was an Armed with a Camera fellow. Since then she has served in several roles including programmer for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and mentor for the Armed with a Camera Fellowship program. Her career in the arts sector began in 2008 when she became a teaching artist for Sitka Fine Arts camp and continued her work with various organizations in that role such as Girls Empowered Making Movies, Girl Scouts of America, Academic Connections UC San Diego and the Media Arts Center in San Diego. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Honolulu Biennial, University of Queensland Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, and UNSW Galleries, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, as well as Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) and Guam International Film Festival. She currently teaches Digital Photography, Introduction to Digital Arts in the Fine Arts Department and Communication Graphics within the Communications Department at Pepperdine.