Born in Guatemala City in 1974, midway through a civil war that ran from 1960 to 1996, Regina Jose Galindo is regarded as one of Latin America's leading performance artists. She won the Golden Lion for best young artist at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and the Prince Claus Award in 2011.

Violence is not an abstract theme in her practice but the condition she grew up in. The Guatemalan conflict left between 40,000 and 200,000 people dead or disappeared, most of them peasants and Indigenous Maya. Gender violence remains structural: an estimated one in two Guatemalan women will suffer an act of it, and the government recorded 2,676 reported cases of sexual violence in the first seven months of 2026, 1,272 of them involving underage girls.

Galindo answers with her own body, often at real physical cost. Her first recorded performance, in 1999, had her suspended from the arch of Guatemala City's post office in a white dress, reading poetry. In Himenoplastia (2004) she underwent surgery to reconstruct her hymen; in Perra (2005) she carved a sexual slur into her own thigh with a knife, a word found on the skin of murdered Guatemalan women. Limpieza Social in 2006 showed her naked, hosed down with high-pressure water like a protester or a prisoner.

Her later works widen the frame. La Manada (2018) answered a notorious gang rape case in Spain, with Galindo kneeling as seven men surrounded her; in Guatemala Feminicida (2021) she dragged a blackened national flag through the streets to protest femicide. America's Family Prison (2008) locked her, her husband and their baby in a model prison cell for 24 hours, and in Make America Great Again (2017) she stood tied to a post in Los Angeles while a dominatrix struck her back each time a visitor dropped a coin in a jar.

Galindo has said her work cannot change the world alone. What it can do, in the spirit of the feminist artist Judy Chicago, whose words frame the profile, is educate, inspire and empower people to act.