Mariana Castillo Deball is an artist who studied in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City and the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She is currently based in Berlin. In 2009, she was awarded the Ars Viva prize, which has been presented by the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI every year since 1953, and is awarded to young visual artists who live and work in Germany.
Castillo Deball uses installation, sculpture, photography and drawing to explore the role objects play in our understanding of identity and history. Engaging in prolonged periods of research and field work, she takes on the role of the explorer or the archaeologist, compiling found materials in a way that reveals new connections and meanings. In Castillo Deball's 2013 work Stelae Storage, plaster casts copied from monolithic Mayan stone sculptures called stelae are displayed on metal racks similar to those found in a museum's storage area. In a similar work, Lost Magic Kingdoms Paolozzi, Castillo Deball culled photographic reproductions from the personal archives of late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who mixed pop and ethnographic references.