Jessica Elena Aquino (she/they) is a fiber interdisciplinary artist, educator, and poet from Santa Ana, CA currently based in Brooklyn. Aquino uses improvisational weaving, sculpture, and the use of childhood & cultural objects to navigate her (dis)connection to familismo, home, love, land, and labor. Aquino intertwines poetry, plant dyeing, and biographical & historical research, to provide a space of healing. She sits in discomfort in unweaving forms of heartache, intergenerational trauma and finding catharsis by working with the earth itself. Jessica Elena Aquino (b.1991) earned her B.A in Studio Art in Painting from Colgate University in 2014 and an MFA at the PA Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. Her work has been exhibited at the Barrett Arts Center in Poughkeepsie, NY; Da Vinci Art Alliance; Philadelphia; PA, The PA Academy of the Fine Arts; and Anna Zorina Gallery. Aquino has been invited to participate in Manufactured Narratives at the Urban Institute for…