Margarita Dittborn

Margarita Dittborn (1979) is a Chilean photographer whose richly layered photomontages blend personal narrative, Baroque iconography, and playful surrealism. Growing up in Santiago, she received her first camera at age thirteen and quickly found her voice behind the lens. After studying visual arts locally, Dittborn began exhibiting internationally in the mid‑2000s, earning critical acclaim for her series Enfermas de Amor (“Lovesick Woman”)—a lush exploration of desire and melancholy rendered through sumptuous still‑life banquets, rabbits chasing carrots, and glowing fruit emerging from shadow.

In 2008 she won the Chile Critics Circle’s “Best Chilean Photography Exhibition” prize for Enfermas de Amor, and the following year was named among the 500 most exciting young artists in the world in the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus triennial catalog. Drawing on her lifelong obsessions with food and animals as well as the dramatic lighting and allegory of 17th‑century Baroque painting, Dittborn constructs each image like a chef composing a feast—carefully arranging objects, figures, and textures to evoke poetic, sometimes eccentric narratives.

Today based in Santiago, Dittborn continues to push the boundaries of photographic storytelling. Her work, characterized by meticulous craft and imaginative vision, invites viewers into dreamlike tableaux where history, memory, and the everyday converge in moments both intimate and uncanny.