Dino Perez is an artist from Santa Ana, California whose work explores memory, place, diaspora, youth culture, and family traditions. Drawing from personal and collective histories rooted in his upbringing in an immigrant community, his practice spans installation, collage, and ceramics. His work reflects on the political and cultural climate of the 1990s, with particular attention to 1994 and the impact of Proposition 187, as well as 1998 as a period shaped by music, identity formation, and youth culture. Through mixed media that includes family photographs, found materials, protest imagery, clay forms, and vernacular design, Perez examines belonging, resilience, and the construction of identity across generations.
Perez’s work often centers lived experience and community memory, tracing connections between personal archives and broader cultural narratives within Mexican American and first generation communities in Orange County. Recurring references to music, dance, and social spaces highlight how youth culture functions as both escape and resistance.
In 2018, Perez presented his solo exhibition It’s Time the Tale Were Told at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, which explored his family’s migration from Mexico to Santa Ana through installation, performance, and sound. His recent exhibition Baile Caile, presented at Grand Central Art Center, expands this inquiry by focusing on dance culture across generations. The exhibition draws parallels between his parents’ experiences in nightclubs such as El Conejo Feliz and El Festival and the ditch party culture of first generation Latinx youth in the 1990s, where music and movement created spaces of connection, identity, and release.
In 2024, Perez participated in a group exhibition Original Sources at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art that examined the immigrant experience through the lens of his life at 10 years old, reflecting on how the climate of anti immigrant policies in California continues to resonate 30 years later. The work created a dialogue between past and present, connecting personal memory to ongoing political conditions.
Perez has participated in numerous exhibitions and community based projects throughout Orange County. He was an Artist in Residence at Grand Central Art Center from 2016 to 2019, where he developed Coloring with the Community, a social practice project that brought residents of the Lacy Neighborhood together through monthly collaborative drawing events. In 2018, he was also an Artist in Residence at the Akumal Art Festival in Mexico, where he created a public mural and led workshops with local youth. He is a co founder of Crear, an initiative developed with Sarah Rafael Garcia that supports creative community engagement.
