Cielo Saucedo (1993, Whittier, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is an access worker and artist from a family of migrant farm workers. Their work encompasses writing, computer generated imagery, sculpture and machine vision. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago in 2020, and their MFA at UCLA in 2024. They were an Eyebeam Democracy Fellow (2024). They are a part of the artist collectives, PlaceHolder and Cripping_CG. Recent exhibitions of their work include presentations at Coaxial Art Center (2025), PlaceHolder Gallery (2025), The Armory, Pasadena for Getty PST (2024), Francios Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024), BlankSpace, Pittsburgh (2023), New Image Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2024), MexiCali Biennale, The Cheech at the Riverside Museum (2023), Human Resources, Los Angeles (2022) Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago (2021) and Rudimiento, Quito (2021). They have given panels and lectures at NYU, UPenn, the Whitney Independent Study Program, Emily Carr University, Indiana State University, and the Sandburg Instituut among other institutions.

Lives and works in Los Angeles. CIELOSAUCEDO@PROTONMAIL.COM
Recent WritingVision: Noise for the Avery Review2026Writing Horizons


Ecosystemic Time
Cripping_Computer_Graphics: Perspectives on disability representation in CG via community generated 3D asset library 2023-2024



Selected press: 

FRIEZE: Five Shows Not To Miss During PST ART  

https://artillerymag.com/scupper/

Arebtye on Screen

EYEBEAM DEMOCRACY FELLOW 2024
Bell Prototype  Shown “Dwarf Fruit“ at Obelus, Berlin. 

mousse magazine
2026
Rotten Sun Performance comission + Residency at Coaxial Art Center.

In collaboration with Jester Bulnes, Jazmin Jazzy Romero and Jesus Gallegos Yela, developed through Saucedo’s residency at Coaxial Arts Foundation. The residency functions less as a site of production and closer to a framework for ensemble formation. We used the space as a provisional studio where performance, video, and sound act as interdependent instruments of perception.

In culmination of the one week residency, the ensemble staged a one night performance that considers place as self. The work extends Coaxial’s architecture into a feedback system in which performers refract into multiples using audio-visual techniques, machine vision, and performance. Within this live environment, subjectivity and images circulate, are recorded, redoubled, and undone. The work emerges from a shared inquiry into how bodies move through architectures shaped by visibility and control in the aftermath of ICE raids that occupied DTLA in the summer of 2025.  

 WEBSITE
2026
Sense 001: Data Haunt Exhibition at PlaceHolder Gallery

2025
Sense 001
Two level video game. Music by Jazzy Romero. 













Installed at Marfa Book Co. with Placeholder Gallery



2024
Captioning System
Machine vision model, led strips, vinyl, wire, solder, 5v power supply, PC tower, tape, PixBlaster chip, motherboard spacers, screws, bolts, steel angle, plywood, extension cord, C stand, DC motor, speed modulator, steel zip ties, 12v battery pack, security camera, plexiglass, threaded bolt, battery pack. 












Installed at Francios Ghebaly for Scupper. 



2024
HorizonsInstalled New Wight Gallery



2024
Overburden 
video, 3:25 min. 


Installed at Blankspace, Pittsburg


Overburden, sinks into legacies of bituminous strip mining in Pittsburgh. The work consists of fluid/frame simulation and amalgamated 3D scans of international mines using the same extractive technologies and modes of dispersal deployed in Western PA. Set in a fabulated network of abandoned drifts sitting just below the surface of Allegheny County, A love story between a bucket wheel excavator, bituminous coal and computer processing systems.
2023
     
short handled hoe! stand up straight and get to work! squat laborious girl, I pray for you!
Short handled hoe, artist’s cane, nylon rope from Don Fidel Saucedo, Silent Spring

Installed at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

The short-handled hoe, or el cortito was a surveillance device utilized in agricultural fields of the Southwest region of the United States. Introduced in California during the late 1800’s, their usage helped develop the state’s high yield mon-crop agribusiness. The short-handled hoe forces a farmworker to perform hard labor bent forward from the waist with their legs almost straight for the majority of their work day (up to 12 hours). Prolonged time in that posture leads to chronic pain, limb difference, spinal degeneration and permanent disabilities. The fields became deathworlds.

If workers were to straighten their backs, their change in posture would alert foramen of their pause in labor leading to putative action. To deal with this harm, workers move faster to justify a pause at the end of the crop row. Their speed increased productivity and profitability for the growers who own the fields while quickening the waste of the workers' health. This cycle ensures a constant turnaround of healthy new hires (mostly migrant workers from Mexico) that could be employed for even cheaper wages. These techniques of supervision, hard labor and waste made up what is now called stoop labor.

In 1975, the state of California banned the use of the short handled hoe. Since the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938, farmworkers have been excluded from labor protections through agribusiness specific exemptions. Prior to its enactment, farm workers were generally Black and thus foreclosed from labor protection under the logics of chattel slavery. Because of this historic legal discrimination, the abolition of the short-handled hoe used an administrative ruling to California State code. It was ruled as an occupational hazard under the same jurisdiction as broken tools. In 2022 the Agricultural Workers' Rights Bill in Colorado, outlawed again the short handled hoe because of constituted use and recognizes this as a violation of a worker’s right to health.

Posture is an indication of health, mental state, physical difference and affect. Corrective and assistive devices, like canes, braces and chairs allow for postural care that relieve chronic pain, mitigate degeneration, and prolong life.
2023
CaduceusCopal, artist’s Social Security Disability Application, Work History Report, EBT card, Medicaid card, LED light panels, mattress.Shown in Nexus at New Image Gallery. 

Disabled mind-bodies are often unable to claim the distinction of worker. To hire a disabled worker with accommodations shifts their labor power and their rate of exploitation lowers. Rather than regulate the rate at which employers hire disabled workers in sustainable ways (that is to say beyond current ADA accommodation distinctions that favor employers), the State subsidizes carceral welfare programs keeping the disabled dependent on systems of exploitation (Medicaid in particular), ensuring the disabled subject's position firmly in the surplus population.

The US Army Medical Corps chose the caduceus for the national symbol of medicine in 1902. In actuality it is symbolic of trade, liars and thieves. Most for-profit medical providers still use the caduceus as part of their marketing.
2022