Vera Long

Vera Long is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and grassroots organizer from South Central Los Angeles. Her practice is grounded in a lived understanding of marginality, resilience, and transformation—experiences that have shaped her creative voice across borders, bodies, and social contexts. Vera’s work exists at the intersection of art and activism, informed by her own story and by the communities she moves with: those who live in the gaps, the overlooked, the silenced, and the surviving.

Growing up in South Central, Vera developed an early awareness of structural violence and the deep strength of grassroots resistance. These roots have remained central to her approach, not only as an artist but as a mentor and cultural worker. Her journey took her to Kyoto, Japan, where she lived in nomadic territory, immersed in alternative ways of being and relating. This chapter in her life deepened her exploration of impermanence, ritual, and the human body's relationship to space and land—concepts that continue to thread through her installations, performances, and community-based projects.

Vera's art practice defies easy categorization. It moves fluidly between media—drawing from video, sound, performance, sculpture, and participatory forms—but is unified by a single aim: to illuminate the full, complex constellation of experience inherent in every person in a body felt. She creates environments and gestures that honor contradiction, vulnerability, trauma, joy, and the nonlinear paths of healing. Her work is often ephemeral, rooted in presence, and attuned to the unseen—what’s carried, inherited, or held silently in the body.

Central to Vera’s vision is the belief that art is not a commodity but a tool for survival, connection, and transformation. She has worked extensively with at-risk youth facing substance dependency, designing creative empowerment programs that use storytelling, movement, and visual art to support self-expression and emotional agency. Her mentorship is grounded in deep listening, reciprocity, and a fierce respect for the dignity of every individual’s journey.

As a grassroots organizer, Vera has collaborated with collectives, harm reduction initiatives, and mutual aid networks, often creating alongside the people she serves. Her projects are as likely to appear in public parks or transitional housing spaces as they are in galleries. She resists institutional constraints in favor of work that breathes with community, urgency, and truth.

Vera’s commitment to radical presence is not performative—it is a lived ethic. Whether leading a workshop with teenagers navigating recovery, installing a temporary altar in a vacant lot, or co-creating a ritual space with elders in Kyoto, her work invites others to pause, to feel, and to recognize the sacredness in ordinary survival.

In all that she creates, Vera Long reminds us that each body carries multitudes—histories, losses, inheritances, and dreams. Her art doesn’t seek to explain or resolve, but to witness. It is through this witnessing, this honoring of complexity without flattening, that she creates a space for healing, disruption, and quiet revolution.