Silvia Poloto didn't train to become an artist—she became one anyway.

Born in Brazil, she arrived in California in the early 1990s as an electrical engineer, with no formal art education and no predetermined path into the arts.

Self-taught and fiercely independent, she learned welding, painting, photography, and other media only when the work required them, allowing each new idea to determine its own materials and form.

For more than three decades, Poloto has built a multidisciplinary practice rooted in experimentation and continual reinvention. Moving fluidly between abstraction and representation, her work explores transformation, impermanence, resilience, and presence. Rather than developing a signature style, she allows each body of work to establish its own visual language, embracing uncertainty as an essential part of the creative process.

Her work has been exhibited internationally throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with exhibitions in cities including Dubai, Paris, Istanbul, Beijing, and Hong Kong. In the San Francisco Bay Area, her work has been featured at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Museo Italo Americano, the Triton Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Bolinas Museum. She was also an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Poloto's work is held in numerous public, corporate, and private collections around the world.