Alejandra is a Venezuelan-American multi-disciplinary artist, muralist and art teacher with a history of working in underserved communities. After nearly two decades as a fashion designer in both the United States and South America, she is now based in New York City. She currently works as a teacher with Pratt Institute and Creative Art Works, and has also taught at the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services and Zen Creative Kids.
Two of the constants in Alejandra’s life are art and meditation; in 2018, she set out to create a program for children that combined them. Working with the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, she developed a curriculum that helped grade-school-aged children learn to observe their emotions and use them as a tool for creating art. At the start of the pandemic, she created an online curriculum that added dance and movement practices to the art-making and meditation that keeps even the youngest children engaged.
From 2009 to 2015, she served as the Founder and Creative Director of Mandelblum, a contemporary fashion brand for women with locations in NYC and Lima, Peru, that combined innovative, wearable, designs with high-quality, mostly natural fabrics. She earned a degree in Fashion Design from Centro de Formación Artística Brivil, in Venezuela. Currently, she is a working artist for Moonglitch Murals, Fat Cat Fab Lab NYC.
Alejandra’s personal art often explores themes of dislocation and nostalgia for a homeland in a perpetual state of political upheaval. Employing both colors and geometries common in her hometown of Caracas, she seeks to contrast the country’s tropical beauty and past prosperity with its current deterioration, violence and decline. Having come from a family of physicians, Alejandra is also interested in processes of degeneration and regeneration and sometimes creates fantastical biological microworlds to explore these aspects of human experience. She has exhibited her work at Maison 10 gallery in New York City; the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling in Harlem; the Corridor gallery in Pasadena, CA; Arte Galeria Forjadores de Mexico in Mexico City; and Gowanus Open Studio in Brooklyn, NY. Her work can be found in private collections in New York, Miami, North Carolina, Boston, and in Europe.