Maria de Los Angeles was born in 1988 in Michoacán, Mexico, the eldest of eight children, and “immigrated” to Santa Rosa, California in 2000 with her family. The first in her family to attend college, De Los Angeles graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in Fine Arts from Santa Rosa Junior College in 2010, a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 2013

Hundreds of paintings, drawings and hard-earned arts supplies were lost in a campus fire at Pratt Institute just weeks before her thesis presentation and her graduate school interview at Yale, works that were necessary for both.

“To get an interview to Yale is a big deal,” she said. “You have to do your best because you may not get another chance. That’s how hard it is. I lost everything, all the work I prepared for my thesis and for the interview at Yale.” De Los Angeles pushed through and completed a new body of work that helped her graduate in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Pratt in Brooklyn, and earned her a highly competitive spot in Yale’s art program. She graduated with an MFA from Yale in May of 2015 and received Yale’s Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, a $10,000 award presented to a promising artist.

De los Angeles has taught as a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute. As a “Dreamer” she has felt she had to be an activist for immigrants. When Pratt invited her to teach a course in Italy, “giving her the opportunity to see the murals of Tintoretto in Venice, as well as the whole sweep of Italian Renaissance Art. The huge floating figures of Chagall in Lincoln Center also inspired her, as well as Siqueiros, the most radical of the Mexican muralists, who successfully paired radical politics with experimental media.”

De los Angeles continues to teach and do her own work, recently working with paper to create “family dresses” and exhibiting them in June of 2016 at Front Art Space in New York. Maria has worked in various mediums including oil, acrylic, etching, woodcut, drawing and sculpture. Her work focuses on figurative and abstract, ranging from small works on paper to large paintings and murals.