Alejandra Pérez and Maceo Montoya

Alejandra Pérez has the arguably bad habit of collecting anything she finds worth praising and preserving—blown-out birthday candles, bird feathers, fragments of overheard conversations, glorified family folklore, and other everyday remnants. Through printmaking, charcoal drawing, and staged miniatures, she transforms these materials into visual narratives.

A twin, Arizona–California native, and churro enthusiast, she divides her time between teaching art to children and her studio practice. In recent years, she has worked as a Latinx Teaching Artist with arts nonprofit Root Division, collaborates with the Bay Area– and Guanajuato-based art collective Aguas Migrantes, and holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Alejandra Pérez is in residence at Can Serrat in November 2025.

Maceo Montoya is a California-based author, visual artist, and educator. He has published books across a range of genres, including his most recent novel, Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces (University of Nevada Press, 2021).

In the visual arts, his paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in exhibitions and publications nationally and internationally. He has collaborated with writers on visual-textual projects such as David Montejano’s Sancho’s Journal (University of Texas Press, 2012), an ethnography of the Brown Berets in San Antonio, and Arturo Mantecon’s translation of Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Poetry Comes Out of My Mouth (Dialogos Books, 2018). In 2021, Red Hen Press published American Quasar, a collaboration with poet David Campos featuring 19 of Montoya’s monoprints.

Montoya grew up in Elmira, California, in a family of artists that includes his father, Malaquias Montoya, a renowned artist, activist, and educator, and his late brother, poet Andrés Montoya. He graduated from Yale University in 2002 and received an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2006. He is a professor at the University of California, Davis, in the Chicana/o Studies Department, where he teaches courses on Chicanx culture and literature, as well as in the English Department’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Since 2022, he has served as editor of the literary magazine Huizache.

Maceo Montoya is in residence at Can Serrat in November 2025.