About the artist

Tatiana Montoya is a fine art photographer based in Cali, Colombia, working across staged photography, documentary, mixed-media collage, and installation. She studied Visual Arts at the Universidad del Valle, and has built a body of work that moves between the mythic and the everyday — costumed fairies in forest streams, tutu-clad ballerinas dissolving into clouds of dust, painted body studies, and quiet portraits of vendors, shoeshiners, and grandmothers in the streets of Cali, Quito, and Cartagena.

Her staged photographs lean cinematic: golden hour, candlelight, double exposures, figures wading into rivers at dusk, hands reaching across red-lit darkness. The recurring motifs — wings, water, fire, blossoms, mirrors, telephones — feel pulled from a personal mythology, equal parts fairy tale and confession. In parallel, her black-and-white documentary work portrays dance companies on stage and Afro-Colombian communities, including the gallery installation Luz Entre Raíces — Miradas Afrocolombianas.

Collage is her other native language. Working with torn pages, found photographs, fabric, and hand-lettered Spanish phrases — ¿qué es el hogar?, la era de hacer fuego, pronto sabremos — she assembles intimate altars about home, falling, rage, and the apocalyptic feminine. The same questions that drive the staged photographs return here as text and texture.

What unites the work is an attention to interior weather. Whether the subject is a friend on the bow of a boat, a dancer mid-spin, or a single anatomical heart pinned over a torn cityscape, Tatiana photographs intimacy, nostalgia, and fantasy as if they were physical materials — as catchable as light. She lists cinema as a constant companion to the work.