Luiza Prado
trandisciplinary artist
Luiza Jesus do Prado, also known as Luiza Prado, de Jesus, J/esú/s, HIFA, or Hifa Cybe, is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, scientist, and technologist. Born in 1988
in the rural periphery of Guaratinguetá, São Paulo, Brazil, she has been working at the intersection of arts, science and technology.
Her research is centered on memory and, consequently, on mental health and its multifactorial dimensions—ranging from trauma, death, and environmental collapse
to gender, sexuality, and the anthropological roots of pain and violence. Her work also addresses how vulgarized concepts of madness have endured across human
history and proposes a decolonization of mental health, integrating emotional, spiritual, and sociopolitical layers.
Since 2010, she has developed trauma reprocessing methodologies through photography. Over time, her research has expanded into using physico-chemical structures
in dialogue with art to explore mental health treatments and possibilities for democratization in public health. Notable projects include Camera Obscura – Decompilation
of Memories of Trauma and Violence and Visual Therapy with Psilocybin.
She also conducts embodied research in Butoh dance, through which she evokes affective memories of the Brazilian countryside, engaging ecological, Indigenous, and African-based expressions of the caipira. Her investigation into appropriation addresses symbolic traces of gender-based and sexual violence.
Her main artistic platforms include photography (especially alternative and expanded processes), sound, and body arts. In performance, her work blends Butoh, physical theater, contemporary dance, aerial chain, pole dance, and Shibari—resulting in ritualistic, visceral, and animalistic compositions. She also employs mediums such as object art, video art, writing, painting, drawing, food, gas and olfactory elements, sculpture, and immersive technologies like VR and AR.
Her works have been featured in international exhibitions and biennials, including PST: LA/LA (USA), Carrousel du Louvre (France), ABC Contemporary (Germany), the Morocco Biennial, and the Shanghai Biennial of Photography and Video (China). Her pieces are included in public collections such as MAC Bogotá (Colombia), EAF (Germany), and the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art of Cusco (Peru).
Resumes
Basic Information
Pronoums: she her / they them
Genderqueer
Diagnosed with autism and high abilities
Her name is Luiza Jesus do Prado and she began her artistic career in 2008 using the name Luiza Prado. She adopted the pseudonym Hifa Cybe (Luiza Prado) to differentiate herself from 3 homonyms.
Artistic Resume
Luiza Jesus do Prado, also known as Hifa Cybe, is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from São Paulo, Brazil. Her work explores memory and mental health through intersections of art, science, and technology. Moving between photography, sound, and body arts, she merges Butoh, Shibari, and experimental media to evoke ritualistic reflections on trauma, gender, and decolonial healing.
Scientific Resume
Luiza Jesus do Prado is a multidisciplinary researcher with a focus on Biophysics, Semiotics, Neuroscience, and Psychobiology. With academic training in Multimedia, Photography, and Biomedical Sciences, she develops research at the intersection of Mental Health, Public Health, and the Arts. Prado is currently a postgraduate student in Psychopathology and Public Health at Santa Casa and holds certifications from institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, HCFMUSP, and Bayreuth in areas including Neurogenetics, Neuroimaging (fMRI), Genome Data Analysis, and Biofabrication.
Her interests span Genetics, Molecular Biology, Pharmacology, Health Tech, Immunology, Toxicology, and Integrative and Complementary Health Practices. She explores experimental and transdisciplinary methodologies that merge Science and Art to create accessible, non-bureaucratic approaches for mental health treatment and harm reduction. Prado also engages in parallel studies in fields such as Mycology, Nuclear Physics, Anthropology, Acoustics, Wave Physics, and Philosophy.
Personal Statment
I define my work as transdisciplinary through integration and seeking solutions through the intersection between art and science. Despite an indefinite horizon, they integrate, organize and merge, maintaining the body as the character that moves between macro and micro, public and private.
The body becomes essential in an aesthetic full of ancestral rituals and signs, keeping it close to the material it recorded, or even material that stimulates denial and repulsion. Consider this composition of a mechanism for the development of an aesthetic considered alternative, visceral, marginalized, expanded and, often, organic, processing platforms in traditional and technical times; fluids, blood, debris, oxidation, putrefaction and recycling.
The feminine, decolonization, peripheral issues, deconstruction of privileges, sexuality,
syncretism, indigenous ancestry, gender, politics, memories and psychosis - these issues,
among others, are common in my work , triggered by my biography. Research that started
with self-knowledge and expanded the need to be useful. An issue in which to make my body available in a political state. Like madness, an art was not a choice, it was a necessity. Choose
a type of resistance and liberation, a method of reprocessing and various perspectives without
limits of development, questioning and especially inclusiv
Poetic
He begins his scientific research talking about the consolidation or recovery of memory through photographic reprocessing, the decompilation of the image and the sound generated by it.
Her artistic work merges with her scientific research, becoming a laboratory in which art makes it possible to materialize and illustrate scientific concepts, also suggesting a democratization of resources used in psychological treatments and the discussion around this subject and science. Her research is about neurophysiological responses to sensory stimuli, mainly sound and image, emphasizing their construction and physicochemical reaction in the human brain.
These studies range from photographic reprocessing, communication decoding and image
decompilation, visual effects induced by chemicals such as psilocybin and reproduced in art,
to performance used as the main focus of trauma desensitization. The development of her
research is transdisciplinary, and proposes a complement to her academic research of the same nature. This environment serves as a laboratory for concepts studied in the area of Semiotics, Neuroscience and Psychobiology, having as sub-areas Biochemistry, Physics, Genetics, Pharmacology and Data Science.