Luísa Leão (Brasília, 1998) lives in the Algarve, where she has been a resident artist at GamaRama Gallery since 2024. A PhD candidate in Arts at the University of Beira Interior, she also holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Fashion Design from the same institution (2019; 2021), having completed academic exchanges at the Politecnico di Milano and the Federal University of Ceará. 

Her practice originates in the gestures of sewing and collage explored during childhood, now revisited through abstract and organic textile-material paintings and sculptures. She works with wool fiber in a process-based and vertical manner, incorporating hereditary textiles and repurposed materials. Her research focuses on the poetics of the thread — understood as a minimal, universal, and ancestral unit — as well as on temporality and the feminine. By mobilizing the politico-affective field, her work emerges from a critique of modern-contemporary fragmentation, proposing a reclamation of the sensible experience. 

With a regular exhibition record since 2022, highlights include her exhibitions at the Museu de Lanifícios (2022, 2023) and her selection as a finalist in the Mostra Nacional de Jovens Criadores (2025). Her practical research has been driven by artist residencies, such as ‘Alinhados pela Mesma Lã’ (Loulé Criativo, 2025) — which culminated in exhibitions at the Palácio Gama Lobo (2025) and the Madrid Design Festival (2026) — and the Textile Art Residency at Tekstiilikeskus, in Estonia (2026). Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the New Hand Lab (Covilhã), with the piece ‘Rescue: time, embroidery and image’, and the Loulé Criativo institutional collection, with the collective project ‘Pastoral Body’.