Artist - Creative Director

Noelia was born in (J)Humacao, Puerto Rico, a town along the eastern Caribbean coastline known for its poets, musicians, and indigenous resistance.

She began developing her artistic mediums at an early age through creative writing and violin performance. Her father, a classical and jazz musician, began teaching her music on the same mountain where her grandfather started both of their careers —by selling a cow to buy his son’s first saxophone.

At 15, she won the FOSJA soloist competition. At just 16, she was awarded a Violin Performance Scholarship from Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts. She went on to become first violinist and soloist with the Puerto Rico Philharmonic Orchestra for ten years. Drawn to a wide range of genres, Noelia has performed with Andrea Bocelli, David Sánchez, Daddy Yankee, Donna Summer, Don Omar, Marc Anthony, Jennifer López, and Michael Bublé.
She won the Carl Sandburg poetry competition with a response poem titled Chi — a city in which she’s become a School of the Art Institute of Chicago Distinguished Scholar Award recipient, a mentee in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Performance Department, a Chicago Golden Gloves Champion with Bill Heglin and Johnny Plaza in her corner, and an Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab alum and collaborator.

Searching for an artistic medium to channel chronic pain, Noelia discovered boxing —a form that now informs her work as performance art, relational art, and the project CANVAS: a visual and sonic body of work that captures the musicality of boxing by inviting Chicago fighters to shadowbox on acrylic, creating kinetic scores across boxing canvases.

Now based along the eastern Great Lakes coastline, her approach to music mediates the concept of sound itself. Improvisation has become her primary medium. As an artist, she is interested in cross-disciplinary, research-based work that rethinks connection and relationship as central sites of inquiry.


©2025Noelia Cruz - Violinist / Multidisciplinary Artist
Website by Camila Cruz