KARELA LUCIA PALAZIO (b. 2003 Managua, Nicaragua)
Education:
2025 *** B.A. Art & Religious Studies, Yale University, cum laude + Distinction in Majors (3.9 GPA), New Haven, CT
2022 *** Summer Study, Theater & Screen Design, University of Arts London, Camberwell, U.K.
Awards/Fellowships:
2025-26 *** Resident Designer, CITY-STATE, Miami, FL
2025 *** Anderson Ranch, scholarship award
2025 *** The Design Kids Awards, Selected among top emerging designers globally
2024 *** Studio Fellowship, Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, Yale University
2024 *** Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies Fellow, Yale MacMillan Center
2023 *** Saybrook College Creative & Performing Arts Award, Yale University
Exhibitions:
2025 *** Tell it Slant, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2024 *** Threshold, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2024 *** Studio Fellowship Exhibition, CCAM, New Haven, CT
2023 *** This Design is Very Human, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2021 *** Untitled: (Portrait of 2021), Bass Museum, Miami, FL
Experience:
2025-25 *** Studio Assistant, Jillian Mayer, Miami, FL
2024 *** Art + Design Intern, Wasserman, Brooklyn, NY
2024 *** Studio Assistant, Oswaldo Caceres, Managua, NI
2024 *** Design Intern, Forum3, Seattle, WA
2024 *** Creative Chair, Yale Spring Fling, New Haven, CT
2023 *** Studio Assistant, Anindita Dutta, NXTHVN Residency, New Haven, CT
2023 *** Graphic Design Intern, Verité, Amherst, MA
2023 *** Project Intern, O, Miami, Miami, FL
2022 *** Furniture Archivist, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
2020 *** Artworks Intern, Arts4Learning, Miami, FL
Publications:
2025 *** Tell it Slant Exhibition Catalog, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2023 *** The Yale Herald, Vol. XCIX Issue(s) 13-23, New Haven, CT
2021 *** Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering, Jai-Alai Books, Miami, FL
My work is rooted in a practice of symbol-making that unfolds across graphic and sculptural mediums. The spiral appears throughout the work because of its ability to transcend time and space. From Indigenous Miskito art in Nicaragua to road signs indicating fire hoses, the spiral represents movement through past, present, and future as a single, ever-expanding unity. It gestures toward a shifting and elusive reality that can never be fully captured. I understand symbols as visual projections of larger patterns within human experience.
In a similar way, shadows act as projections of physical objects. I use shadows in my work to extend sculptures beyond their physical form, creating a space between the material and the metaphysical. Interested in how shadow can evoke religious experience through its physicality, my works begin in light—the divine—and resolve into amorphous forms that speak to an internal sensation or feeling.
In conversation with my design practice, which collects and reorganizes the visual language of the everyday, this work reflects my interest in constructing systems of meaning that reveal how the sacred can emerge through ordinary materials and sensory experience.
Recently, I have been translating traditional weaving structures into metal, isolating repetitive forms and treating them as iconographic elements.
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KARELALUCIA@GMAIL.COM