2027 “ON NATIVE LAND” CALENDAR ARTIST

Bio: Paola Macas Betchart | Artist, Educator & Anthropologist

Paola Macas Betchart is a queer, Indigenous Andean artist, educator, and environmental anthropologist based in Gasgo’sagöh, Turtle Island. Holding a Master’s in Anthropology and Sustainable Development, she integrates academic rigor with a ritualistic creative practice that blends photography, fiber arts, and ancestral storytelling. Her work—including the project Visible and Invisible Scars—explores intergenerational trauma, transforming photography into “mirror and medicine” to reclaim silenced narratives.

Through tactile media such as photo embroidery, anthotype, and collage, Paola layers memory and emotion, offering the body as a site of rupture and healing. Currently developing a forest conservation project in the Andean Chocó, she weaves connections between ethnobotany, land regeneration, and cultural survival. As a mother and advocate, Paola creates sacred spaces for vulnerability and reimagination, inviting us back into relationship with ourselves, the land, and our ancestors to envision futures rooted in collective liberation and mutual care.

What does “On Native Land” mean to you? To exist on Native land is to connect with a different framework of belonging; it is an unlearning of the colonial nation-state and its borders. In its place, we embrace a renewed sense of presence that weaves the body into the land we currently inhabit, as well as the diverse lands of our ancestry.