Natalia Almonte

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Almonte proposes a concept rooted in her Puerto Ricanness, Chronic Islandism, to investigate how colonialism transcends from the body to the psyche. She coined the term "melancolonia” to describe this incongruence, a phenomenon felt in the collective nervous system. Her interest in exploring psychosocial and emotional anatomies through art-making, led her to pursue a therapy practice.

Through experimental audiovisual poetics, text and multimedia installation, Almonte builds diasporic theaters that investigate harmonies, histories and contradictions. While questioning the authority of language and other systems, she reflects on the lack of trust in the grandiose, and gravitates towards the delicate.

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Almonte is an artist, curator, and soon-to-be therapist, born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Since 2011, she has lived in NYC and is currently pursuing an M.Ed. degree in Mental Health Counseling at Hunter College. She holds an MFA, Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School and has exhibited in Puerto Rico, Greece, and the U.S.

In 2018, Almonte co-founded the artist and curatorial collective, Paradoxluxe, that considers the intangible similarities between Greece and Puerto Rico through the lens of two entities in debt, but not indebted to, empires that control their economies.