Andrés Parra, also known by his drag alter ego Nia De Indias, is a visual artist and drag performer with a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile).
Growing up in his hometown of Bucaramanga, in the north of Colombia and close to the Venezuelan border, he was fascinated by aspects of local popular culture such as the Matachines (popular festivals with masked men in colourful dresses) or the beauty pageants, whose contestants he admired. At age 17, he moved to Chile, making his migratory process one of his main creative references.
In 2015 he created his drag alter ego Nia De Indias, with which he tours different spaces in the city to make his queer identity visible in public, reflecting on migration and tensioning the hegemonic canons of art history and masculinity in Latin America.
His work seeks to blur the boundaries of drag and find new codes of resistance, developing his pieces mainly from recycled materials from his make-up removal process, interventions on objects and images found in antique markets, and more recently exploring multimedia tools such as sound and video.
Nia De Indias has had solo exhibitions in Santiago and group exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Bucaramanga (Colombia), Miami and London. He received an Honourable Mention in the MAVI UC Arte Joven Prize in 2022 and third place in the Artespacio Joven Prize in 2020. His work is part of institutional and private collections.
Andrés Parra lives and works in Santiago, Chile.
