Artist · Creative Director
Noelia was born in (J)Humacao, Borikén—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 fifteen, she won the FOSJA Soloist Competition. At just sixteen, 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. In music and composition, improvisation has become her main medium and the place where she mediates the concept of sound itself.
Searching for a medium to channel chronic pain, Noelia embraces boxing—a form that now informs her work as performance art, relational art, and the project CANVAS: a multimedia body of work that captures the musicality and artistry of boxing through acrylic paint shadowboxing compositions presented as gestural paintings and performed as musical scores.
Now based along the eastern Great Lakes coastline, she is interested in cross-disciplinary, research-based projects that restore art’s inherent relationship to community. Her practice honors the understanding that art does not arrive to community—it originates from it. Through this lens, she explores the restoration of cultural and relational spaces where creation once again asserts a collective sense of identity and belonging.