Dionis Ortiz is an interdisciplinary artist, community art producer, and Educator based in Harlem. He explores a fantastical coming of age story illustrating his Dominican American experience. His work takes on masculinity, vulnerability, the supernatural, family, and spirituality.

Working with vinyl tiles is an opportunity for him to express something expansive and meditative in design. He employs a laborious and tedious process of layering vinyl tiles on top of tiles in a pattern and reveals some of the previous tiles to create a fictitious environment. He also utilizes his dreams, photographs, drawings, and domestic objects to create cyanotype prints based around being a single father and acknowledge the loss of family members. He utilizes the sky and clouds in cyanotype prints because of dreams he has about flying and the unknown, the objects transcend and play a dual role in the printed image. This idea of duality in images connects back to the dual role he plays as a Dominican American.

Recently, Ortiz was selected to be an Artist-in-Residence at Children’s Museum of Manhattan (2020) and Materials for the Arts (2018), and a fellow for The Laundromat Project’s Create Change (2018) and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s Studio Immersion Project (2013). A former participant of The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM program (2013), Ortiz also won public art commissions from Harlem River Park Fund (2011) and was the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rema Hort Artist Community Engagement grant (2019) and Hunter College President’s Award (2019). He holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase College (2001) and an MFA from Hunter College (2018).