María-Elena Pombo is a Venezuelan artist and researcher based in NYC working through open-ended and interconnected projects that investigate real and speculative pasts, presents, and futures through installations, sculptures, videos, and moments that play with site-specificity, ephemerality, and participation.

Pombo is artist in residence at Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program. She has participated in residencies and fellowships at Yaddo, Wave Hill, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Bronx Museum, and NEW INC, The New Museum’s incubator for art, design & technology.

Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been exhibited at Somerset House (London), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), Bronx Museum of the Arts (NYC), Yamamoto-Seika (Osaka), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), Zona Maco (México City), and more across the USA, Europe, Japan and Latin America.

She won the 2021 London Design Biennale’s Theme Medal, and has received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Queens Council on the Arts, New York Restoration Project, and more.

Pombo’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Slowdown, Metal Magazine, i-D Italia, Vogue México, Forbes, and the book ‘True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes”.

She is faculty at Parsons School of Design, teaching and developing curriculum for studio classes with a focus on research and experimentation. Pombo was instructor at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden, where she designed and taught classes on natural dyes through a decolonial and non-extractivist lens.

Smack Mellon is a nonprofit arts organization located in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Smack Mellon’s mission is to nurture and support emerging, under-recognized mid-career and women artists in the creation and exhibition of new work, by providing exhibition opportunities, studio workspace, and access to equipment and technical assistance for the realization of ambitious projects. We see ourselves as a vehicle whereby under-represented artists can create, explore and exhibit their creative ideas outside the concerns of the commercial art world, offering many artists the exposure and recognition they deserve.