SAN JOSE, CA.- The Institute of Contemporary Art San José (ICA) congratulates exhibiting artist Miguel Novelo on being named a 2026 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awardee. The honor comes during Novelo’s presentation at the ICA San José, on view through August 23, 2026, and follows his selection as a 2026 Knight Arts + Tech Fellow earlier this year.

Artadia selected Novelo, alongside Morehshin Allahyari and Maya Fuji, as recipients of the 2026 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia. The three awardees were chosen from a distinguished group of finalists that also included Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Soleé Darrell, and Daniel Arthur Mendoza.

The award recognizes artists whose work demonstrates exceptional artistic merit and supports their continued practice efforts through unrestricted funding. This year’s San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awards are funded by lead supporters Pamela and David Hornik, the Artadia Board of Directors, Artadia Council supporters, and individual donors across the country.

The Awards decision was reached after an extensive two-tiered jurying process selected by Round 1 jurors Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Independent Curator and Director of Programming & Engagement, Anderson Collection at Stanford University; Zoë Latzer, Curator, ICA San José; Claudia Mattos, Associate Curator, Moody Center for the Arts; and Round 2 juror Amara Antilla, Independent Curator.

“Miguel Novelo’s use of found materials ranging from rocks to e-waste highlight the artist’s investment in today’s most pressing ecological questions,” noted Amara Antilla. “His work straddles various disciplines and knowledge systems to create interactive experiences that embody what the artist terms ‘techno-shamanism.’ His investment in interrogating technology invites us to question how and if these tools are really serving us.”





Trisha Lagaso Goldberg added, “I love the paths of curiosity Miguel carves for himself, paths that lead to quirky, odd, and genuinely interesting places. He brings a playful directness to his use of technology, asking big questions about technoshamanism and technophobia alike and getting big, strange results back. I’m excited to see what this award allows him to build next.”

Currently on view at ICA San José, INFRAMUNDO is Novelo’s first institutional solo exhibition and brings together Indigenous knowledge systems, ecological grief, and technological innovation. Drawing from Maya cosmology and the cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula, Novelo considers the relationships between humans, machines, and the living world through a speculative environment shaped by digital technologies, sculpture, sound, and reclaimed materials. The exhibition invites audiences to reflect on cycles of transformation, deep planetary time, and the possibilities of connection beyond human perception.

INFRAMUNDO remains on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José through August 23, 2026.

Working between his origins in the Yucatán Peninsula and the Bay Area, Miguel Novelo’s practice is technoshamanic—combining emerging technologies with Indigenous knowledge to create interactive installations, films, and sculptures. Using game engines and generative systems, he builds immersive rituals where audiences use serious play to inhabit non-human perspectives, whether moving like a bat or thinking at the scale of a meteorite. By making these speculative encounters accessible, his work invites viewers to slow down, embrace ecological grief, and intimately explore the continuous creation and destruction of the living.

Miguel Novelo is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practices include algorithmic cinema, game engines, and interaction design to explore non-human perspectives and world-building—creating systems where audiences engage with geological change, animal cognition, and the spaces between landscape and data. He holds an MFA from Stanford University (2022) and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2018), and his work has been presented at international film festivals, museums and galleries. Novelo currently teaches as a Lecturer in Experimental Media Arts at Stanford University and in the CADRE program at San José State University.