painter amongst other things
Born in Hayward, California, Ellena has been painting and creating in ceramics for over ten years. She works in oil and watercolor, painting internal and external landscapes in combination with emotion and history. Re-indigenizing how we view land and our interactions with the natural world, her paintings are an extension of their body and her body is an extension of the land. Her ceramic work is deeply inspired by Tonala and Talavera vessels from Jalisco and Puebla, finding the midground between functional and sculptural pieces. Ellena graduated in the spring of 2021 from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with a Bachelor's in Fine Art with a focus in painting and a minor in Gender and Sexualities. She has been working all over the East Bay as a teaching artist since 2022, working with students of all ages. Some galleries that have shown their work include Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Roots Gallery in Ashland, and HPU Kaneohe Gallery. They were a studio artist at Root Division in San Francisco 2025-2026. Ellena will be graduating in December 2026 with a Masters in Library and Information Science degree with a focus on art librarianship and archive practices. She weaves this work into her artistic practice through facilitating mixed media workshops using archival photos and hosting community archiving events.
My creative practice explores longing, memory, and the enduring echo of place through the language of landscape painting. I am drawn to the way land holds memory: how it stores the traces of what has happened upon it. Every cultivation, every scar, every act of care alters its surface and its spirit—shifting soil, reshaping growth, stirring energy. I view the land as the origin of the body, and ultimately, its destination. I am an extension of the land and thus the work I make is informed by the land around me, the land from where my family came from, and the land I care for. A reciprocity of care, attention, and nourishment passes between us. My work centers the responsibility—and tenderness—of caring for the places that sustain us. Pulling from the memory of my body, the memory from those before me, and the memory of the land, I create oil paintings that reflect both the internal landscape of the body and the external, geographic world.
ellena.ruiz25@gmail.com
photo by Quentin Torres
