Natalia Ortega Gámez (b. 1980, Santo Domingo) is a Dominican artist and designer whose practice moves between craft, sculpture, and installation. Living and working in Santo Domingo, her research centers on artisanal processes and the natural materials — fibers, clay, bamboo, palm leaf — that carry the memory and daily life of Dominican and Caribbean culture. Her work addresses themes ranging from humor and sexuality to climate and the human condition, treating art as both personal expression and a space of encounter between self and other.
Ortega Gámez trained at Altos de Chavón La Escuela de Diseño, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Product Design from Parsons School of Design in New York, and later studied at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. These years across design and fine arts disciplines shaped an interdisciplinary practice that resists easy categorization. Central to her work is Los Tejedores, the platform she co-directs with musician Ricardo Ariel Toribio, which brings her into sustained collaboration with Dominican and Haitian weavers — elevating traditional textile techniques into a contemporary language rooted in Hispaniola's shared material culture.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Art Museum of the Americas (Washington D.C.), De Appel (Amsterdam), the II and III Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño (Madrid), and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, among others. In 2016, she was the inaugural artist selected for the Davidoff Art Initiative residency at Flora Ars+Natura in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work is held in the collections of the Centro León Jiménez (Santiago), the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, and the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo.