Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her paintings formally address questions between abstraction, non-representation, simplification, symbol, and painting as a language with ambiguous structural limitations. Her landscapes meander and distort physical spaces like mazes meant to be misleading. Utilizing chemical reactions within a painting, Estefanía experiments with raw pigments, spray materials, oil mediums, and acrylic polymers. Her painting language ruptures visual spaces, opening the viewer's receptivity to fleeting spaces, times, and emotional presence.

While in residence, Estefanía has explored the painting medium through a new series of oil paints on panels. Her palette has adapted, reflecting the medium’s material connection to context, natural light change, and the surrounding landscape. Her work’s approach to the idea of longing has also changed from being in the context of Puerto Rico to now relating a distance to New York City, articulating a diasporic relation to place as constant navigation between geographic space.