GIRLS AND BOYS, WE HAVE RIGHTS!

• María Jesús Guarda Wiegand (Santiago, 1984) is an illustrator, designer and educator. She studied design at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and has a master’s degree in both, Illustration from University of the Arts of London and in Children’s Book Illustration from Cambridge School of Arts. She currently works as a freelance illustrator and is an educator in the Illustration Diploma at Escuela de Arte UC. In 2018 she won first place in the Macmillan Prize of Illustration. Her illustrations were selected as finalists for the 55th illustrators’ exhibition version of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2021. She has illustrated and written album-books with various publishers, being awarded the Medalla Colibrí award from IBBY Chile for Paloma Voló in 2022 and, in 2024, she entered the IBBY international honour list.

• Karina Letelier Oteiza (Santiago, 1976) is an illustrator, designer and teacher. She studied Visual Communication Design at Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana and has a master’s degree in Animation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. She works as a university educator and as a freelance illustrator, mainly of children’s books, which have been translated into multiple languages. In 2023 and 2024, she was selected as finalist for the illustrators’ exhibition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Furthermore, in 2023 her book La mejor mascota del mundo was selected for the Recommended Books category of Premio Fundación Cuatrogatos award. In 2021, she was awarded the Medalla Colobrí for the Youth Non-Fiction category of IBBY Chile for the book En Marcha, movimientos sociales de ayer y hoy.

About the contest

The contest was framed within the commemoration of the 50 years of the civil-military coup and sought a project capable of reflecting a critical and original reflection on these evolving rights: how are girls and boys thought of as legal subjects today, how does this take place in practice and how these are projected and/or imagined into a future. Such consideration is based on the fact that children are subjects of law and active participants in society. The general objective of the contest was to “Develop an exhibition project that invites girls and boys to reflect on their rights today and in the future.”