Cristóbal Bianchi

Cristóbal Bianchi is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work focuses on collaborative, socially engaged practices at the intersection of poetics, memory, and social change. He founded the Casagrande art collective in Chile, known for interventions like Bombing of Poems—a project distributing poems via aircraft in cities affected by aerial bombing—and Coalsack: Universal Poem to the Cosmos, a pandemic-era collaborative poem broadcast to outer space. His research explores non-conventional spaces (e.g., the sky, vertical movement) as creative mediums and participatory art’s role in addressing social inequities in urban contexts.

• Education: BA/MA Psychology (Universidad de Santiago de Chile), MA Interactive Media (Goldsmiths, University of London), PhD Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths).

Key research streams include the agency of public art in reimagining civic spaces and the role of collaborative practices in challenging political narratives. His recent works, such as Fundar (a Santiago wasteland installation), critically engage Chile’s Constitutional referendum process. Bianchi’s creative outputs include poetry books like Avistamientos (2022) and the film poem Factories at Sea (2022), which has screened at international festivals.

His scholarly work bridges art, activism, and memory, with a focus on Latin American contexts. Collaborations include partnerships with the pOETAS collective and Hygge Universe, blending art with astronomy.