Panmela Castro (b. 1981, Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian visual artist working across painting, performance, video, photography, sculpture, and installation, whose practice is structured around the concept of affective drift: the idea that chance, encounter, and emotional exchange are not peripheral to art-making but its very subject.
Rooted in her formation as a graffiti artist in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Castro has developed a body of work that places the female body, questions of identity, and the politics of belonging at the centre of a rigorous and deeply personal inquiry. Her ongoing series Retratos Relatos (Portraits Reports, from 2019), built from accounts of violence and resilience sent to her by women across Brazil, exemplifies the relational logic of her practice: painting as an act of witness, recognition, and collective memory.
Her works are held in major international collections including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Instituto Inhotim, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). Panmela Castro is presented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin in the solo exhibition Portraits of Belonging, on view at the gallery's Fasanenstrasse location from September 10 to October 22, 2026, as part of Berlin Art Week.
Panmela Castro was born on June 26, 1981, in the neighbourhood of Penha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She completed a Technical Course in Advertising and Propaganda at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios do Rio de Janeiro (1998), followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Painting at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, 2007). She subsequently earned a Master's degree in Contemporary Artistic Processes from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, 2013), and in 2024 completed a postgraduate specialisation in Human Rights, Social Responsibility and Global Citizenship at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC RS). Her formation spans both the institutional structures of Brazilian fine arts education and the lived realities of the city's streets, a tension that has remained generative throughout her career.
Castro began her practice as a graffiti artist under the alias Anarkia Boladona, working in the public spaces of Rio de Janeiro from 2005 onwards and using the walls of the city as a site for feminist intervention. Over time, her practice expanded into performance, painting, video, photography, and installation, with performance understood as a relational process from which all other media unfold. The concept of affective drift is central to her work: Castro initiates encounters with other people, particularly women, and allows the traces of those encounters to determine the form and content of the resulting works. Her long-running series Retratos Relatos (Portraits Reports, from 2019), in which she paints large-scale portraits based on written accounts of violence and resilience sent to her by women from across Brazil, is among the most sustained expressions of this methodology. The series has toured six institutions across Brazil and, in 2025, travelled to Paris as part of the Year of Brazil in France at the invitation of the Brazilian government. Her solo exhibition Ideias Radicais Sobre o Amor at the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR, 2024) and her multidisciplinary intervention En El Sueño, La Vigilia at the Franz Mayer Museum, Mexico City (2024) further demonstrate the institutional reach of her practice.
Castro's work is held in significant international and Brazilian collections. Internationally, her works are part of the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA), and the United Nations, among others. In Brazil, her works are held by Instituto Inhotim (Brumadinho), the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (MNBA, Rio de Janeiro), the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia (MAC BA), and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul (MAC RS), among others. She has been nominated for the PIPA Prize (2019 and 2020) and was named one of Newsweek's 150 Women Who Shake the World (2015). Her work has been featured in Heloisa Buarque de Holanda's landmark publication Explosão Feminista, which identifies Castro as a central figure of the fourth wave of feminism in Brazil.
Castro has exhibited widely across Brazil and internationally. Key solo exhibitions include Direito ao Afeto at the Pavilhão Victor Brecheret, Rio de Janeiro (2025); Retratos Relatos at Sesc Centro, Curitiba (2025); Ideias Radicais Sobre o Amor at the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR, 2024); Do Jardim, Um Oceano at Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon (2024); Deriva Afetiva: Dakar at Instituto Inclusartiz, Rio de Janeiro (2023); Retratos Relatos at the Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro (2021); and Retratos Relatos at the Vila Cultural Cora Coralina, Goiânia (2022). Group exhibition highlights include Histórias Brasileiras at MASP (2022), the 13th Mercosul Biennial Trauma, Dream and Escape (2023), Quilombo: Life, Problems and Aspirations of Black People at Instituto Inhotim (2022), the Bienal das Amazônias (2024), and FUNK: A Cry of Boldness and Freedom at MAR (2023 to 2025). She has undertaken residencies at the Goethe-Institut, El Espacio 23 (Miami), and Black Rock Senegal (Dakar), the latter resulting in the group exhibition Encountersat the Blaise Senghor Cultural Center, Dakar (2024).
Panmela Castro is presented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin in the solo exhibition Portraits of Belonging, her first solo painting show in Berlin, on view at the gallery's Fasanenstrasse location from September 10 to October 22, 2026, as part of Berlin Art Week. The exhibition brings together a series of large-scale portraits that explore identity, belonging, and human encounter, many of them created during a recent residency in Portugal and reflecting the historical and contemporary entanglements between Brazil and Portugal. Moving between precise figuration and gestural dissolution, Castro reclaims portraiture as an act of recognition, granting visibility and dignity to those often overlooked, in close dialogue with her long-standing feminist activism and her organisation Rede NAMI, the non-profit network she founded to promote women's rights and combat gender-based violence through art and education.
With a practice that continues to expand in geographic scope and formal ambition, Panmela Castro stands as one of the most consequential voices in contemporary Brazilian art, an artist for whom painting, encounter, and political commitment are inseparable.
