Born and raised in the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago, Aquarius Ester Alegria is an award winning Afro-Surrealist film writer/director and performance artist. Aquarius creates works that explore repetition and the individual and generational effects of religious trauma.

 

Aquarius' performance work includes both, solo projects and collaborations, with artists such as, Najee-Zaid Searcy in Zo//Ra, featuring music for Honey Pot Performance’s Ma(s)king Her (2016) at Millennium Park. She also danced in collaboration with Participatory Music Coalition and supported several live and recorded compositions by Angel Bat Dawid and was a featured performer in ETHOS by Ayako Kato. 

 

Aquarius' first film, Ambivert (2016), was examined by the Disability in Media Studies course at NYU, then adapted for audiences with vision impairment. Ambivert can be viewed on the OTV app. She is a previous OTV Film Fellow and her script, Second Sunday was selected for Full Spectrum Feature's 2021 Independent Producer's Lab. That same year, she received the Englewood Arts Collective's United Still Grant and Her film, New Hire (2024), was featured in, Our Right to Gaze, a six-city film anthology featuring original narrative short films by emerging Black artists. New Hire received 6 festival laurels, and won Best Cinematography at Flex Obscura's 2024 Film Festival. Aquarius screened a proof of concept for Second Sunday with the The Production Institute's Community Storyteller's Initiative at University of Chicago later that year.

 

Aquarius is currently a student at The Art Institute of Chicago where she is developing a body of work called Young Blackgirlhood, a personal deconstruction of compulsory Christianity through durational performance, archive development, and ambient audio/visual repetition.