Joelle Mercedes is a multimedia artist, producing works that reframe origin while creating new metaphors that encourage yet complicate the notion of self-determination, self-authorship, and personal mythologies. Their work is concerned with and inquires about origins of complicated cultural narratives that often get oversimplified. Mercedes attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago as a Merit Scholar. Their work has been exhibited in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York and Berlin, in art venues such as Threewalls, Roman Susan, Arts Incubator and Lynden Sculpture Garden, among others. Recently, Mercedes has been published in Strange Attractors, a book project of the 10th Berlin Biennale: We Don’t Need Another Hero.