David Antonio Cruz’s painting explores the intersection of queer identity, race, and community, focusing on the visibility of Brown, Black, and queer bodies through psychologically charged compositions that combine figuration, abstraction, and collage. In many of his dreamlike works, the act of posing becomes an expression of resistance, play, and self-affirmation. He has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, ICA Philadelphia, ICA San Francisco, ICA Boston, and El Museo del Barrio. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award in 2018 and the Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2025. He is a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. He earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Yale University and lives and works in New York.