María Elena Pombo

María-Elena Pombo is a Venezuelan artist and researcher working across installation, sculpture, video, and moments that play with site-specificity, ephemerality, and participation.

Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been exhibited at Somerset House (London), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), A/D/O (Brooklyn), SXSW (Austin), Yamamoto-Seika (Osaka), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), and more across the USA, Europe, Japan and Latin America.

Pombo has participated in residencies and fellowships with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Wave Hill, Yaddo, the Bronx Museum, and NEW INC, The New Museum’s incubator for art, design & technology.

She won the 2021 London Design Biennale’s Theme Medal, and has received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Queens Council on the Arts, New York Restoration Project, and more.

Pombo’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Slowdown, Metal Magazine, i-D Italia, Vogue México, Forbes, and the book ‘True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes”.

She is faculty at Parsons School of Design, teaching and developing curriculum for studio classes with a focus on research and experimentation. Pombo was instructor at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden, where she designed and taught classes on natural dyes through a decolonial and non-extractivist lens.

At Woodward Residency, Pombo will work on 11227 TQM 4EVER (11227 ILYSM 4EVER), a project named after the former joint zip code of Ridgewood/Bushwick that explores the past, present and future of these neighborhoods. Based on her experiences sourcing material and doing public art in these neighborhoods where she has worked and/or lived for over 10 years.