About me

Krisia Ayala is an Interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, and art educator born in San Juan and raised in Cataño, Puerto Rico. In her artistic work, she utilizes digital and printed media to elaborate and confront problems related to the parallels between human and avian migration.

Ayala started her artistic journey in 2007 when she got accepted at La Escuela de Artes Plásticas. There, she achieved a BFA in the concentration of Image and Design with a minor in Traditional Printmaking. As part of her seminar project, she developed an artist book called Pajareando por Puerto Rico, which combined her birdwatching field studies and illustrations in a multisensory book with sound modules, textured paper, and objects found in the places she explored. The book was quickly acknowledged by both the scientific and the artistic community by being presented in biology symposiums and at the National Gallery of Puerto Rico.

In 2014 she was forced to move to NYC due to a significant economic crisis in Puerto Rico that hindered creatives from finding job opportunities. Once there, she joined the Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice MFA at The City College of New York. The program allowed her to achieve multiple milestones, such as creating  an international educational workshop called The Migration kit: If you had wings, where would you go? to serve kids in Eastern Europe. These kids were being displaced or forced to migrate due to the conflict in their homelands.

Since then, Ayala has used the data from those findings to inform her artistic work, which focuses on a fusion of generative art and abstract cartography. She then translates the drawings into physical objects with the use of various fabrication methods.

Ayala is currently working on publishing new work in the form of printed periodicals, zines,  and multisensory artist books. She is now an artist in residence at the Visual Narrative MFA Risolab at the School of Visual Arts. Through that residency, she plans to create an edition of her book Pajareando... By using the Risograph printing process. The new edition will be a scaled down redesign of the original book and it will combine sound modules and full color risographs.

Ayala currently works as an Associate Professor at the Electronic Design and Multimedia Art Department at The City College of New York.