Julianna hopes to expand her practice globally, amplifying immigrant voices and contributing to art’s role in cultural survival and social transformation.

Julianna Sanromán is currently pursuing an MFA at the Stamps School of Art and Design at UM-Ann Arbor. Julianna is an artist from Southwest Detroit who draws deep inspiration from her upbringing in Jalisco, Mexico. Her practice, rooted in painting and mixed media, explores themes of displacement, permanence, and belonging. Through her work, she seeks to memorialize absence and honor the resilience of immigrant communities. Her paintings have been exhibited at The Scarab Club and MOCAD, and she is currently a 2024 Emerging Artist Fellow with Playground Detroit and a 2025 Modern Ancient Brown Fellow. She earned her BFA from the College for Creative Studies, graduating as valedictorian and recipient of the prestigious Imre J. Molnar Award.

Now at U-M, Julianna’s thesis investigates how art can serve as a tool for memory-making, resistance, and healing within the context of immigrant narratives shaped by deportation, displacement, and intergenerational trauma. By blending intimate storytelling with historical inquiry, she aims to create visual archives that preserve family and community histories too often left untold.

Julianna’s artistic journey is deeply personal. After her parents’ deportation, she became her family’s main breadwinner while also pursuing her education. She continues to support her parents’ medical needs and helps to care for her younger sister, who suffered a brain injury in college. Despite these challenges, art became a space of healing and hope where grief could be confronted and transformed into resilience.

Through layered compositions and symbolic gestures, Julianna explores how the body carries memory and how art can spark empathy, inspire action, and create collective spaces for connection. With her MFA studies, Julianna hopes to expand her practice globally, amplifying immigrant voices and contributing to art’s role in cultural survival and social transformation.

CEW+ admires Julianna’s perseverance and artistic expression and names her a Elsie Choy Lee Scholar.