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Background: Amid Venezuela’s displacement crisis, millions have migrated across Latin America, with Colombia serving as a principal host country. Venezuelan migrants are frequently subjected to violent and stigmatizing public discourses, which are especially acute for gay and bisexual men engaged in sex work and living with HIV.

Objectives: This study examines how arts-based research can function as a democratic practice to understand and respond to structural marginalization by enabling made-marginalized migrant communities to challenge stigma and assert alternative forms of knowledge, voice, and visibility.

Methods: Between November 2024 and January 2025, six arts-based workshops led were conducted with 13 Venezuelan gay and bisexual men migrants, sex workers in Medellin, Colombia, where participants created different art pieces (e.g., fanzine, upcycling). Workshops incorporated collective discussion and reflection alongside artistic production.

Results: Arts-based workshops created spaces for participants to collectively interrogate and resist violent public discourses surrounding migration, sexuality, sex work, and HIV. Workshops functioned as evolving democratic spaces, with group culture and artistic expression shifting through dialogue and creative practice. Community-informed facilitation supported participant agency in shaping artistic form and content, reinforcing the workshops as participatory rather than extractive research spaces. Through art-making as intervention, participants reframed identities, articulated counter-narratives, and transformed stigmatizing representations into affirmations of agency, dignity, belonging, and self-determined visibility.

Conclusion: Arts-based research can operate as a form of democratic engagement in research, offering made-vulnerable populations meaningful opportunities to contest violence, produce situated knowledge, and reimagine public narratives at the intersection of art, medicine, and social justice.