Photographed by Michael Higgins in Teheran, 2015
 Esperanza Collado is an artist and researcher working across film, performance, installation and writing. Her practice explores the dematerialization of cinema and its articulation beyond the screen, as well as the performativity of language: text treated as plastic material, words that act, move and occupy space. Her pieces, often ephemeral and at times close to the sculptural, engage spatial montage and the physical presence of the viewer, from text-performances such as Things Said Once to the light and language works shown in Poemas androides (Madrid, 2026).

Her work is informed by long-standing research into expanded cinema and its legacy; she holds a PhD on the concept of paracinema and has always approached her practice as a form of research.

Her research has been supported by The Art of Film Award from the Arts Council of Ireland (2009) for her film-performance project Cinema... Corpus vs Cerebrum, a postdoctoral Fellowship in New York (2009-2010) researching the body in exhibition cinema, and a Fellowship in Taiwan (2020) researching expanded cinema in East Asia. In 2026 she undertook a research stay at Image Forum (Tokyo).

She has presented work across Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia, in contexts such as Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Light Cone (Paris), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Taipei Contemporary Art Center (Taipei) and the 12th Havana Biennial (Cuba). She is the author of the award-winning book Paracinema: la desmaterialización del cine en las prácticas artísticas (Trama, Madrid 2012) and co-founded the artists' record label LEVE and the Experimental Film Club in Dublin.

Collado is based in Cuenca (Spain) and lectures at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). She directed the MA in Performance Practice and Visual Culture (MNCARS) between 2022—24 and has been a guest lecturer in art institutions and master's programmes, such as Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian) and MasterLAV (Madrid).