Joelle Mercedes is an artist and educator based in Chicago. Their work engages video, sound compositions, critical pedagogy, collages, drawings, and performance to reenact remnants of erotic exchange between the human—which is to say the animal—and the more-than-human world. Their embodied, material, and intellectual inquiry pursues notions of ecological transmutation; a working term they employ to consider events of reciprocal change between bodies and ecologies. Their work traces these titillating residues through an amalgamation of phenomena, sensitivity, and intimacy to produce works of fiction, carnality, improvisation, dissidence, perversion and play. 

They were born and raised in New York City to a Black Dominican immigrant family. Their work has been presented in various forms at venues in Chicago including Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gallery 400, Nightingale Cinema, Links Hall, 6018North, Threewalls; and nationally and internationally at venues such as Index Art Book Fair (Venice, IT), Materia Abierta (Mexico City, MX), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE), among others.