Michelle Angela Ortiz is an award-winning visual artist, skilled muralist, community arts educator, and filmmaker whose work centers the stories of people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted.
Through community-based art practices, painting, documentary filmmaking, and public art installations, Ortiz uses art as a vehicle for social change—creating spaces for dialogue, reflection, and healing. Her work transforms public spaces into visual affirmations that honor resilience and cultural memory.
Over the past 25 years, Ortiz has completed more than fifty public art projects nationally and internationally. Since 2008, she has led art-for-social-change initiatives in Costa Rica and Ecuador and served as a Cultural Envoy through the U.S. Embassy in in Fiji, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba.
Ortiz has exhibited her works in many galleries and museums that include the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and the New Yorker.
Ortiz’s work has been widely recognized. She is a Hearthland Foundation Artist National Fellow, a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Fellow, a Pew Fellow, a Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist National Fellow, and a recipient of the Americans for the Arts Public Art Award which honors outstanding public art projects in the nation.
Ortiz currently serves as the board Co-chair of Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art, history, and design studio based in Philadelphia. Monument Lab is dedicated to advancing justice by reimagining monuments as places for belonging, learning, and healing.