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Background: Nearly one million Venezuelans have resettled in Lima over the past decade, making it the world’s largest urban host city. Women comprise half of migrants, and amid economic/labour precarity and gender-based inequalities, some engage in sex work, increasing vulnerability.

Objective: To co-conduct creative laboratories with Venezuelan women engaged in sex work that center their lived knowledge and meaning-making around migration, settlement, and labor.

Methods: Guided by Creative Relational Inquiry, 10 migrant women sex workers aged 18 and over participated in five six-hour creative laboratories (May–June 2025), co-facilitated with a community artists’ collective. Group discussions and reflection focused on experiences of migration, resettlement, and sex work. Arts-based outputs (e.g. play, dance, writing, and theatre, group dialogue), and reflexive fieldnotes were analyzed using a relational thematic approach.

Results: Laboratories culminated in a performance piece that rendered sex work a central, multidimensional site of migration and settlement, naming violence, trauma, and harm while re-framing sex work as labor, dignity, and collective survival. Role-playing and iterative improvisation fostered relationality, emotional relief, joy, and a sense of safety, functioning as practices of collective repair amid ongoing precarity. Sustained social ties and a closed-audience presentation emerged as outcomes, enabling continued connection and collective reflection on the process.

Conclusions: This study demonstrates that flexible, arts-based praxis can elicit difficult and often silenced knowledge while supporting relational well-being and symbolic repair among migrant women sex workers living with violence, discrimination, and moral injury, with clear relevance for health research and practice in contexts of crisis and displacement.