Melissa Bonilla

Melissa Bonilla (Melissa Llamo) was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic in 1995. She graduated in Social Communication, mention in Audiovisual Production at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) in 2017. Recently, she participated in the XXIX National Biennial of Visual Arts where she presented her piece "En esta casa vive dios". In that same year, she was selected in the 28th Eduardo León Jimenes Art Contest presenting an installation titled "Hoy mi cuerpo desapareció". In 2019 she won third place in the "Illustrating Inequality" contest organized by Oxfam DR and also participated in the exhibition held by the same institution in February 2020 at the Silvano Lora Workshop in Santo Domingo.
In my work, I look for ways to express visually how my feelings transform my experiences in the city, my approach to people, and also to understand where that way of feeling comes from. I use digital media as a tool, mainly illustrations, which allow me to express the internal emotional processes along with the perceived reality of everyday life with its historical shadow, where in a few lines I tell a lot. Within that same internal vision, I analyze themes that have arisen as a consequence of traditions and cultural heritages that have shaped thoughts and actions, transformed into a collective identity that at the same time is processed by individual internal traumas.