BIO

Amaya Lounibos Hartard is a Chilean-American artist from the Bay Area, California. She currently lives and goes to school in Long Beach, working towards a BFA in printmaking at CSU Long Beach. In addition to this, she is a member of the California Printmaker’s Association and the Los Angeles Society of Printmakers. Using printmaking and painting techniques, her work captures her experience as a queer, biracial woman. Amaya explores themes of home, identity, family, cycles of life, and activism, through her repetitive use of double self portraiture. Her work is embedded with the appearance of repeated motifs; conch shells, houses, long braids, swallows, fish, and ribbons. The motifs work together to weave a narrative; beginning to create a universe that her artwork exists inside of. In her work, Amaya aims to make space for people who are under-represented in fine art spaces and make art accessible to the public. In April 2024, Amaya hosted her first solo show, “Chilenita y Gringa” at Slough City Gallery. Following that, in June 2024, Amaya curated her first group show, "Liberation!", celebrating queer people and voices. In 2025, Amaya was awarded "Best in Printmaking" at TAG Gallery in Los Angeles.Outside of art, Amaya has secret talents in whistling and playing the trombone.

STATEMENT

Through printmaking and painting techniques, my work explores my identity as a queer biracial woman and navigates themes of home, womanhood, family and the cyclical nature of life and energy. What is Home? Where is Home? Who is Home? And, how does Home change over time? In my exploration of my own identity, my work is saturated with the use of double self portraiture. Because of the fluidity and evolving nature of the self, I am interested in literally transforming my figures into different places, objects, and even veiling them; stripping myself of any likeness, gender and features at times. In addition, my body of work is embedded with the appearance of repeated motifs; a conch shell, houses, long braids, veils, swallows, deer, fish, flags and ribbons. Placed into the landscapes of the places I call home; the Andes, grassy hills, mountains, my grandma’s house, and the Pacific Ocean, these motifs work together to weave not only a deeply autobiographical narrative about myself, but the larger ancestral history of human migration.

Through the investigation of migration, my work naturally raise questions about the United States’ deep roots in the colonization of the world, and ultimately, my role as the result of US imperialism. With these questions, I evaluate what it means to be a part of a colonial entity like the United States in conjunction with being a part of Latin America; one of the many victims of US intervention.

I choose to work in printmaking because of the rich history the medium holds in activism, protest and social justice movements. When the printing press was invented, it quickly changed the course of humanity. The printing press allowed people to spread mass amounts of information all over the world; transcending borders, language, and cultures, regardless of a person's class. This wide spreading of information brought by the printmaking, mimics and goes hand in hand with patterns of human migration. Migration is a massive part of the natural world and has touched every single human being's life in multiple different ways. When a naturally occurring process becomes politicised and criminally punishable, there is no way to separate your own existence from the world around you.