She is a recipient of the prestigious Creative Australia Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, has exhibited at New York MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, PS1, Fundacion La Caixa in Barcelona, the DAROS Foundation in Zurich, and the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid.

While never limited by materials or methods, her curiosity about worlds-within-worlds permeates everything she does. In the early 1980s, following in the footsteps of her accomplished architect parents, Cardoso studied architecture and visual arts at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In 1987, she moved to the USA where she graduated with a Masters degree in sculpture at Yale University, having been awarded a full scholarship.

One of her most fabled projects is The Cardoso Flea Circus (1994-2000), a performance piece featuring real live fleas. Over the course of a six-year period, Cardoso trained fleas to perform surprising feats such as walking on tightropes, pulling chariots, jumping through hoops and dancing tango. The Circus toured internationally at venues including the Sydney Opera House, the Centre Pompidou, the Arts Festival Atlanta, the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), and the San Francisco Exploratorium. This work, including a series of videos made in collaboration with Ross Rudesch Harley, is now part of Tate Modern’s permanent collection.

In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned her to create a major new installation featuring 36,000 plastic lilies along a 125-foot-long wall. The permanent beauty of the plastic flowers, which imitated the architecture of old cemeteries in Colombia, expressed a mourning for lives lost during the rampant violence suffered in her country of birth.

In 2003, she represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a large installation of starfish woven together into a submarine landscape called Woven Water. In that same year she had a major solo show, Zoomorphia, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Throughout her career, Cardoso has continued to explore nature and its links to culture and science. In 2012 she completed her PhD at the University of Sydney’s College of the Arts. Her research on the aesthetics of reproductive morphology—likely to be one of the more unusual studies to be presented in the hallowed halls of academia—culminated in the Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO).

At MoCo, exhibited at Cockatoo Island as part of the 18th Biennale of Sydney, visitors encountered animal genitalia and sexual selection through three-dimensional models in glass, bronze and 3D printing, videos, drawings and electron-microscopy scans, all displayed in museum cases.

Over the years she has worked on different public art projects, using large-scale to emphasise the wonders of nature, particularly of the small. In 2022 she completed Ripples and Droplets (2022), a 335 square metres mural inspired by the natural movement of water. Integrated into Castle Residencies mixed development, the mural stands 11 stories high and is believed to be the largest public artwork by an Australian artist in the Sydney CBD.

Cardoso has lived and worked in Sydney since 1997.