Born in Medellin and raised in Miami, Juan Jose Cielo adopted these respective city’s histories, landscapes, and modes of social interaction, embracing a hybrid identity inherent to many immigrant experiences. Growing up he learned irony and satire from his comedian father. He studied at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, The Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Cooper Union in New York. Using these experiences as inspiration, Cielo’s artwork is motivated by melding “in-between” people and places with his own imagined realities. The result is paintings and short films inspired as much from Cielo’s immigrant experiences and everyday societal observations as from found imagery depicting space and technology. 

Although Cielo has had a lifelong interest in space, his participation in the Mars Desert Research Station residency allowed him to use high speed cameras that simulated running in gravity. He also illuminated mountains and built a runway in the desert for ships. This experience cemented his obsession with the celestial. As an undefined, boundless, and borderless terrain—in antithesis of the constructs of a country or continent—space is an unencumbered and democratic place of infinite possibility. This openness combined with the fragmenting and remastering of cultures he witnessed through migration, inspired Cielo to create eclectic scenes that conflate influences and eras and act as imaginative simulations for aspirations and dreams. 

Functioning like a theatre stage, Cielo’s painting Cartas de amor (Love Letters) (2022) depicts an astronaut wearing a spacesuit covered in family portraits—uniting contradictory ideas of exploration and home, and public and private space. In his short film Eclipse Solar (2019), fact and epic predictions are centerstage. Driving through his father’s hometown of Marinilla in Colombia, Cielo had his father announce an eclipse happening seven years in the future from a public announcement system.  Bringing space to daily life, the gap between this present-day public proclamation and the future celestial prophecy is peculiar yet also unnervingly true.

Juan Jose Cielo emigrated to Miami when he was four years old, left to study and returned to the growing city for the 2023 Fountainhead Residency. Here, Cielo saw the opportunity to relate his concepts of hybridity within a community that has eclectic cultures and experiences. Cielo continued developing ideas combining science fiction and locality, and daily life and the imaginary, to show a more nuanced reality of lived experiences.