Iliana Ortega (b. Mexico City, 1981)

Is a visual artist based in New York City. She holds a BFA from Guanajuato University and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art.

Uncanny and mysterious beauty are the signature of artist Iliana Ortega.
Iliana focused on photography, painting, drawing and video. Using conceptual elements from photography procedures and integrating philosophical concepts about how light behaves. Her work continues to explore new frontiers where different mediums work together. Ortega’s work has been exhibited internationally, including Gene Byron Museum, Guanajuato Mexico; Higher Pictures Gallery, New York, NY; Interstate projects, Brooklyn NY; Vasconcelos Library, Mexico City; Diego Rivera Museum, Mexico City; Kunsthaus Santa Fé, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico; Glass Museum, Monterrey, N.L., among others. Ortega has been a recipient of several awards including, most recently, New York City Artist Corps Grant, The New York Community Trust Oscar Williams grant and the Edward F. Albee Foundation Artist Residency Fellowship in Montauk, NY.

Her work involves an ongoing research of the coalescence between light and the absence of it. She pursues the uncanny as a form of generating new forms of seeing beauty and light phenomena. The luminescence captured by the camera, transformed with drawings, gives birth to isolated environments where silence flows through time. Digital construction allows a graceful interaction of different sources of light. The beauty of mysterious light builds up landscapes in a subtle manner and carefully alters the flowing of seasonal glow in the sceneries generating new ways of communication.