B I O G R A P H Y

Ana María Velasco is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice weaves painting, ceramics, drawing, immersive installation, and community-centered pedagogy to examine the interdependence of culture and living ecosystems. Approaching art as a regenerative act attuned to planetary rhythms, she engages contemporary ecological thought and posthumanist perspectives to position landscape not as backdrop, but as an active protagonist in which human and non-human forces coexist without hierarchy.

For over a decade, La Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia has informed her artistic inquiry. Immersed in one of the planet’s most biodiverse and irreplaceable territories, Velasco encountered rituals and ceremonial practices that sustain balance between land, spirit, and community. The loom emerged as both structure and archetype—anatomical, topographical, and cosmological. Invisible threads connect rivers, mountains, animals, and human bodies; painting becomes a site for witnessing these entanglements within a unified visual field, where line, form, and color operate as connective tissue for memory and sacred trace.

Her compositions move between gestural abstraction and dreamlike figuration. A helicopter dissolves into a river; a mountain becomes a gathering. Celebration and conflict unfold within the same spatial continuum, where contradiction is sustained rather than resolved. Through layered surfaces, organic forms, and nuanced explorations of color and movement, Velasco renders perceptible what often remains unseen: migratory rhythms, atmospheric shifts, wind currents, and the fragile tensions between preservation and collapse. In translating these phenomena into painterly language, she invites a reconsideration of our sensory and ethical relationship to the natural world.

Velasco develops a cohesive investigation into relational ecology and material agency. While her large-scale canvases unfold as expansive cosmologies, intimate works on paper attend to sacred encounters at close range. Ceramic trees, bats, people, spiders, frogs, jaguars, and snakes rise from painted terrains as living extensions of these ecosystems, as though the earth itself had softened into clay and pigment. Emerging from soil and imagination, these sculptural forms remain in dialogue with the landscapes that birthed them—offerings that gesture toward healing, reciprocity, and planetary balance.

Ana Maria holds an MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston where she also received a certificate in Museum Studies. Her undergraduate degree is from La Universidad Javeriana and El Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes in Cali, Colombia. She studied Tibetan Art for ten years at The New York Tibetan Art Studio. The contemplative and somatic disciplines of Indo-Tibetan Yoga and Buddha's teachings actively inform both her art studio practices and her educational initiatives.

Some exhibitions include, The Dreamers at Sothebys Institute in NYC; Saundarya ARTBO Galeria Mmaison Bogota, Colombia; Rios Intermitentes: Encuentros Biennal in Matanzas,Cuba; Symbiosis curated by Beth Rudin The Woody at The Berkshire Botanical Garden; Ficciones Retinianas in El Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia Cali, Colombia; Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity by Maria Magdalena Campos Pons at Madison Square Park Conservancy in NYC; The World has a Heart at YAWA Center for Science, Art and Technology during COP 16 in Cali, Colombia; Awaken:Conjuring our tomorrow Salem State University Winfisky Gallery, Salem, MA; Interdependencia at The Colombian Consulate in NYC. She was invited by The Korean Fine Arts Association and Kate Oh Gallery to exhibit in Seoul, Korea; Her work is held in public collections such as the Harvard University Art Collection in Cambridge, MA, Bank of America in Boston MA, Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia Cali, and numerous private collections across the Americas and Europe. Committed to art as a catalyst for regeneration, Velasco founded Neem Foundation, a non profit that promotes art, yoga, and meditation as alternative for healing processes for people affected by violence and trauma. She continues to work with La Sierra Artist Residency and Caring for Colombia Foundations. She lives and works between Brooklyn, New York, Cali and La Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.