Eilen Itzel Mena

Eilen Itzel Mena (born 1994 in the United States) is an Afro-Dominican American artist, writer, and community organizer from the South Bronx, New York, currently based in London. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, performance, and social practice, Mena explores how people throughout the African Diaspora and Latin America pursue joy, purpose, healing, and self-knowledge while navigating histories of colonialism, displacement, and cultural erasure. Her practice moves between figuration and abstraction, combining saturated color, expressive mark-making, recurring symbols, fragments of the body, and spiritual references to create spaces where personal memory, ancestral history, and imaginative possibility converge.  Mena’s Afro-Dominican upbringing is central to her visual language. She has described childhood memories of vibrantly painted homes in the Dominican Republic and the cultural intersections of the South Bronx as important sources for her intense palette and layered compositions. Palms, hearts, rainbows, clouds, flowers, hands, feet, heads, acrylic nails, lipstick, and other recurring forms operate as parts of what she describes as an expanded visual language. Rather than treating color simply as decoration, Mena uses its intensity to oppose the psychological and cultural invisibility imposed upon Black and Brown bodies, histories, and creative practices.  Mena received a BFA in Fine Arts from the USC Roski School of Art & Design in 2017 and an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London in 2024. She received the Adrian Carruthers Studio Prize for her Slade MFA Degree Show presentation and previously received the Slade’s Terence Cuneo Prize. Her work has been presented internationally in London, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico City, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Recent projects include La Subida del Destino (Destiny’s Climb) at Moosey, In Her Spirit with Bolanle Contemporary and The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, Under the Palm’s Grace at Untitled Art Miami Beach, and the 2026 group exhibitions Syntax, I, too, overflow, and Cosecha. Mena was an ACME Early Career Programme artist in London in 2025 and will participate in Fountainhead’s Miami residency from September 16 to October 14, 2026.