Emiliana Henriquez (b. 1986) is born in El Salvador and raised in East Los Angeles. Her practice emerges from the intersections of diasporic experiences, spiritual inquiry, and the symbolic architectures that shape collective memory. Growing up with culturally layered and socially complex environments, she became attuned early on to the way communities form, fragment and reinvent themselves, a sensibility that now informs the emotional and symbolic terrain of her work. Her upbringing was enriched by a household engaged with Yoruba, Hindu, and Sacred Geometry traditions, fostering an early sensitivity to ritual, cosmology, and the metaphoric power of form.
A largely self-taught painter, Henriquez refined her practice through mentorship, intuition, and immersive experience. Her compositions blend atmospheric color fields with archetypal motifs, weaving devotional references, symbolic textiles, and narrative fragments into scenes that feel suspended between spiritual gesture and psychological interiority.Her second solo exhibition, "Warm Blue Velvet", presented at Half Gallery (New York, 2025), marked a significant evolution in her exploration of cross-cultural symbolism. Drawing from her travels in Egypt and the shared devotional structures of Abrahamic faiths, the series employed medieval visual strategies and a distilled palette to illuminate underlying commonalities across belief systems.
Henriquez’s work has been featured widely across the United States and Europe, including exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation (New York), Felix Art Fair (Los Angeles), The Armory Show (New York), Upstairs Art Fair (Paris), and Untitled Art Fair Miami with Sorondo Projects (2025). Her inclusion in Soul Storm (Munich, 2025) and Friends & Lovers at The FLAG Art Foundation (2023) situates her practice within an international dialogue on figuration, memory, and contemporary identity. Henriquez was selected for Artsy’s nationwide Artists Shaping Culture campaign for Hispanic Heritage Month, named one of Artsy’s “5 Artists on Our Radar,” and profiled by publications such as Cultured, The Miami Herald, BOOOOOOOM, and the Hammer Museum’s Graphite Journal. She has participated in notable artist residencies, including Fountainhead (Miami), The Macedonia Institute (Upstate New York), and Moosey (2025). She is also a recipient of the LA Lakers In the Paint Award (2022–2023).
Since 2025, Henriquez has been working nomadically across Europe and North Africa. Now based in Essaouira, Morocco, she continues to expand her exploration of cross-cultural devotional practices, translating her encounters into a visual vocabulary that bridges myth, memory, and spiritual continuity.