Maria Morillo is a Latina mixed-media portrait artist based in Los Angeles. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, and shaped by years of working across visual art, fashion, and cinema, she approaches the human figure as a space for identity, character, memory, and transformation.Her ongoing portrait series, The Tree of Life, emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic, when absence and uncertainty transformed the way she perceived faces and human presence.

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Working primarily on wood panels, Morillo combines torn paper, oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, textiles, wax, and layered materials to construct portraits that move between recognition and transformation. She builds a sense of presence through fragments, gesture, texture, and material.At the center of her practice is a deep interest in people and character.

 

Her professional background in costume design has shaped the way she observes a subject: through color, silhouette, texture, gesture, and the small visual details that suggest personality and history. In costume, these elements help give a character life; in her studio practice, they become another way of approaching the portrait and imagining the story that may exist beyond the visible face.

 

Across painting, collage, and moving-image work, Morillo explores identity not as something fixed, but as something continuously assembled, disrupted, and remade. Her portraits leave space for ambiguity, allowing the viewer to encounter each subject not as a complete explanation, but as a presence still in the process of becoming.