Molly Soda (b. 1989) is an artist working in video, performance, photography and installation, whose practice unfolds largely on social media platforms such as Tumblr, YouTube and Instagram. Her work examines how people, particularly young women, perform for an unseen audience and shape their own online identities and memories.,
Soda was born Amalia Soto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and lives and works in New York.She studied photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 2011.She began posting online as Amalia on LiveJournal before adopting the name Molly Soda. Since then, she has built a body of work across Tumblr and YouTube.Her early videos were hosted on the platform Newhive. The artist Canek Zapata later discovered her work there and cited it as an influence on his Doomscrolling>>>.In 2015, Annka Kultys Gallery's inaugural solo show featured 25 of her video works, each priced at ten pence per view.
In 2017, her augmented reality collaboration with Nicole Ruggiero and Refrakt was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize.She went on to receive the Lumen Prize Founder's Award for Slide To Expose.Her work has also entered the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of the Moving Image and the Thoma Foundation. In 2024, she debuted her play Trivial Pursuit at PAGEANT in Brooklyn. The following year, she presented Meeee at Alyssa Davis Gallery in New York, a compilation of TikTok livestreams in which she joins streamers' chat rooms and asks to have her profile picture rated.
She is featured among the 137 artists in Kate Vass Galerie's “Collecting Art Onchain” book.
