Christopher López (b.1984), a Puerto Rican Lens-Based Artist, Educator, and Public Historian was born in The Bronx and was raised between New York and New Jersey. He has been working as a visual artist since 2005. To date, many of his works have centered historical figures and cultural events across the archipelago of Puerto Rico. Often exploring obscure and diminishing histories, his photographs reckon with the past as a means to confront the complex conditions underlying contemporary forms of identity and place existing for Puerto Rican peoples in our present day. His work was most notably featured in the exhibition, Caribbean; Crossroads of the World, which spanned three museums in New York City showcasing over a hundred years of Caribbean art from the region's most prominent artists.
As an Educator, Christopher has developed and piloted programs for the Aperture Foundation in New York City as well as developed curriculum and facilitated youth art intensives for The Center for Urban Pedagogy City Studies program at the International Community High School in The South Bronx.
López has been awarded fellowships at The Laundromat Project and The Diaspora Solidarities Lab with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is the recipient of the 2025 NJ Individual Artist Fellowship. Currently, he is a full member of Diversify Photo, an initiative started to diversify the photography industry. His most recent publication, The Afterlives of Ismael Rivera was published in 2022 by Arca Press a subsidiary press of Michigan State University and has been collected by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Thomas J. Watson Library. His recent body of work, The Fires, explores the history of gentrification and arson in the city of Hoboken, New Jersey. The work utilizes the appropriation of archives, portraiture, and oral history to create a new living archive of this history born from shared community experience and knowledge. The project has received awards from The New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey Historical Commission. Christopher has served on numerous panels and has lectured at institutions such as Cornell University, Michigan State University, and Barnard College among others. His artworks are currently in the permanent collections of El Museo Del Barrio, The World Trade Center Memorial Museum, and The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.