José Santiago Pérez (he/him) is an artist and educator based in Chicago who traces his ancestry to the Nawat people of Kuscatlán (El Salvador). He weaves plastics into containers of time, vessels of memory, portals for speculation, and spaces of belonging.

José is a 2022 resident fellow at the Lunder Institute of American Art and a 2019-2020 HATCH resident at Chicago Artists Coalition. His work has been supported by an Illinois Arts Council Agency grant, a DCASE Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago, and a Chicago Artists Coalition SPARK grant. Solo exhibitions in 2022 include Portalisms at Boundary in Chicago and Shimmerings of the Not Yet (T)Here at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. José has presented craft and performance based work in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Features and reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Basketry+ Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, Newcity Art, Art Intercepts, Other Peoples Pixels, and the Archives + Futures Podcast.

He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies department.