About the Artist

Cynthia Renta (Ladylore) is an Afro-Latinx Caribbean interdisciplinary artist, performer, director, and cultural strategist whose work bridges ritual performance, folklore, public art, and social practice. Rooted in the Afro-Indigenous traditions of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the broader Caribbean diaspora, her practice engages the body as an archive, ritual as method, and storytelling as a tool for cultural memory, resistance, and transformation.

Working across live performance, site-specific activation, and emerging digital forms, Renta creates character-driven and participatory works that explore migration, identity, ancestral memory, gender, and collective healing. Her practice draws from Bomba, Plena, Orisha and rumba traditions, as well as spiritual arts and community-based cultural organizing, to build immersive performance worlds grounded in embodied knowledge and diasporic experience.

In the context of increasing anti-immigrant enforcement, surveillance, and displacement, particularly through systems such as ICE, her work responds to the urgent realities shaping immigrant and diasporic communities in New York City. As a Puerto Rican artist navigating the complexities of U.S. citizenship within a colonial framework, she examines how Caribbean identity functions as both bridge and tension across Latin American diasporas with differing relationships to migration, legality, and belonging.

Her work actively explores solidarities between Afro-Latinx, Black, and broader Latine communities, tracing shared histories of colonialism, forced movement, labor, and cultural resilience. Through site-specific performances and cultural activations across urban and natural spaces including bodegas, community institutions, spiritual sites, and public landscapes, she engages the layered histories of place while entering into dialogue with land, ecology, and climate justice.

Renta’s practice is grounded in cultural organizing, using art as a method for community gathering, political awareness, and collective imagination. Her work extends from her leadership in youth-centered and socially engaged performance which center voice, embodiment, and social transformation.

Her current project, Contraband: The Amazing Doña Fefa, expands this practice into a multi-dimensional performance and digital storytelling ecosystem, translating ritual, character, and cultural memory into cinematic, visual, and interactive forms. Across all mediums, Renta’s work positions art as both witness and intervention—an evolving space where memory is preserved, identities are reimagined, and collective futures are made possible.