Headshot by Ryan Bourque, 2023. [Image Description: A brown queer person, wearing a brick-colored jacket, clear-pink glasses, and a tied handkerchief stands looking at the camera with a slight smile.]

about 


Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. 

A 2020-2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art in America, ArtCritical, Art Papers, Poem-A-Day, The Recluse, GenderFail, No, Dear, Long River Review, TAYO Literary Magazine, among others. They are the author of the collection This is your receipt and is not a ticket for travel (Faint Line Press, 2023) and the chaplets wavy in its heat, to be elsewhere, and suggestion as more profound or more interesting than the thing itself (or, july) (Ghost City Press Summer Series, 2022/2023/2024).  

An honors graduate of the University of Connecticut, danilo is Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum and formerly Curatorial Assistant at Socrates Sculpture Park. danilo is the (co)curator of the exhibitions to hold a we (BRIC, 2024); Eligible/Illegible (with Francisco Donoso, PS122, 2023); We turn (EFA Project Space/SHIFT Residency, 2021); support structures (Virtual/8th Floor Gallery feat Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency, 2020); and Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, 2019).

danilo is the author The Post Post Post newsletter on Substack, and has contributed writing to exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation (Even there, there are stars), Miriam Gallery (The earth leaked red ocher), Abrons Art Center/Boston Center for the Arts (A Language for Intimacy), Second Street Gallery (Franscisco Donoso: Pathways), Real Art Ways (Kevin Quilles Bonilla: As the palm is bent, the boy is inclined), and No Longer Empty. As an independent programmer, danilo has produced and co-produced programs and series at The Studio Museum in Harlem, CUE Art Foundation, and Carriage House Theater. 

danilo has performed work at venues including National Sawdust, Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club. As DJ Queer Shoulders, danilo has DJ’d as a part of programs and fundraisers with The Shed, ART PAPERS, CultureHub, Experiments in Opera, Crown Heights Mutual Aid, Connecticut UndocuFund, and Connecticut Students for a Dream.

They are working to show up with care for their communities.