Rebeka Rodriguez Mondragón is an artist, curator, and cultural producer whose work explores the body as a site for personal and collective histories, desire, community, and queer aesthetics. She works across photography, video, and collaboratively generated projects and happenings, cultivating an arts practice that is deeply rooted in intimacy, self-representation, and connection.
Rebeka’s photography practice is a reflection of her relationships and community. Drawing inspiration from her family of friends, artists and queens, she creates intimate portraits that honor her models and muses as they wish to be seen—on their own terms. In her work, we see identity, desire, and community intersect in rich visual narratives.
While cultivating her photography practice, Rodriguez has also dedicated over two decades to creating space for urgent conversations, curating site-specific public art projects and designing arts education programs. Most recently, she produced public art projects for the San Francisco Arts Commission. As the former Director of Community Partnerships at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, she developed creative programming responsive to the social, historical, and geographic contexts of the communities she served.
In 2012, Rodriguez founded the Teaching Artist in Residence Program at Bessie Carmichael Elementary School, a program that remains active today, creating space for students to explore their creativity and agency. She previously served as Program Director of Education & Community Engagement at Intersection for the Arts, where she developed public forums, interdisciplinary projects, and initiatives that bridged art and social change. In addition to her institutional work, she has curated exhibitions and public art projects for organizations including San Francisco State University, the National Queer Arts Festival, and BART.
Rodriguez is a graduate in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on contemporary Chicana & Latina artists. She has also shared her expertise as a guest lecturer at Stanford University, mentoring students in curatorial production.
Balancing both her personal arts practice and her curatorial work, Rodriguez remains dedicated to creating spaces—both physical and conceptual—where art fosters connection, visibility, and transformation. Through her photography, public art projects, and curatorial initiatives, she continues to shape discourse around creative placekeeping, cultural stewardship, and the role of artists in reimagining the future.