About The Artist
Paulina Olivares Bio 2025
Based in Bloomfield, NJ, Chilean born artist Paulina Olivares works on oil paints, acrylics and mixed media creating multi layered, colorful pieces. She received a BA of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in NYC and a Masters in Education from Kean University. Currently, she works as a school teacher in Paterson NJ and continues painting in her spare time. As an artist her diverse practices include painting and designs based on her life experiences. Her work is influenced by Latin culture and urban living and is expressed through the vivid, contrasting hues of cobalt reds in an organic feel.
Paulina Olivares’s paintings are a vivid exploration of the human experience, rooted in her personal journey from Chile, where she survived the oppressive dictatorship. She relates and conveys her experience to current life as a first grade teacher in an inner city school. Her work, deeply surreal and organic, mirrors the complexity of her experiences, both the struggle for survival and the nurturing of new generations.
In her work Olivares art invites the viewer into dreamlike realms, often combining fluid, flowing forms with unexpected, almost otherworldly elements. Her compositions are organic, suggesting growth, decay, and transformation in ways that feel both familiar and foreign. The paintings are linked to her experiences growing up in a politically turbulent environment, where change and instability were constant. The surreal nature of her paintings creates spaces where memory, identity, and emotion collide, allowing her to communicate the unspoken traumas of displacement and survival in a way that is deeply personal, yet universal.
As a teacher, Olivares is a storyteller of a different kind, shaping young minds and passing on lessons of resilience, empathy, and hope. It’s clear that her art and her teaching are both forms of expression and healing. Through the intuitive brushstrokes of her paintings and the patient guidance she offers her students, Olivares is continually working to make sense of her past while helping others navigate their own challenges. In both her classroom and her artwork, she cultivates spaces where the surreal becomes a way to process the complexities of life and survival, showing that there is beauty and strength to be found even in the most difficult circumstances.
In this dual role, as a survivor and a nurturer, Paulina Olivares’s work provides a profound insight into the intersection of personal history and artistic expression. Her paintings serve as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, while her teaching is a reminder that even amidst hardship, there is the potential for growth, connection, and transformation.