Valeria González, curator
2011 – 2022
SachaJi Wellness Mountain Retreat
Sustainable architecture and landscape design
Otavalo, Ecuador
See Video
A permanent, site-specific project in the Andean highlands that merges sustainable design, feng shui, and sacred geometry to create a sanctuary for healing, cultural memory, and homage to the landscape.
“Sacha Jí, a dispersed system of wellness hospitality functions that are embedded into the mountainous slope, allowing its incline to merge into the folds of the architectural roofs, designed by Teresa Ponce and Diego Ponce. The mountain and the built environment blend into a single telluric system.”
Ana Maria Duran Calisto, architect, urbanist, and writer
Contemporary Architecture of Ecuador (1999–2015)
2006 – 2011
Pipeline Series
Large-scale pigment prints
Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, Brasil
Pipeline is a photographic series documenting Latin American landscapes intersected by oil pipelines, referencing national 19th-century romantic painting styles in each country, to make visible the hidden presence of extractive infrastructure.
PDF & ARTIST STATEMENT
“Ponce’s panoramic photographs offer idyllic images of the natural splendor that surrounds the route cleared for the construction of the pipeline. She leaves it to the viewer to imagine the long-term environmental consequences of her country’s growing dependence on oil as a source of energy to power its economic development.”
Christopher Phillips, independent curator and critic
Expanded Geographies
“Maria Teresa Ponce’s lush color photographs of the oil pipeline running from the Amazon region in Ecuador to the Pacific coast stand out. You can’t see the pipeline in every photograph; sometimes it is partly or completely buried. But a bucolic image of children playing near a stream where a woman washes clothing is an eerie reminder of how global trade can affect remote regions. (Even more unsettling, as Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers points out in a catalog essay, is that a promotional tourist campaign for Ecuador uses “Life at Its Purest” as a slogan.)”
Martha Schwendener, The New York Times, Aug. 31, 2007
A Latino Biennial That Bucks a Global Trend
«The work is nourished by the didactic spirit that painting had in the past centuries and that aspired to capture people’s attention through apparent documentary representations but loaded with ideology»
Alejandro Castellotes, independent photography curator
Encubrimientos, 2010, PHotoESPAÑA
«The series brings to light a kind of scar that crosses the continent, indifferent – as the omnivorous logic of transnational capital – to the singularities of the territories that it covers, between the mountainous Andean country and the southern Patagonia.»
Valeria González, curator
Museo de Arte Latino americano Buenos Aires MALBA, Argentina
2002 – 2006
YUYANA / MUDANZAS / TRAYECTOS
Video exchange animation and site-specific public video installations
Ecuador, Spain, New York
Sponsored by Queens Museum of Art, NY, and IX Cuenca Biennial Collaborative public art projects about Ecuadorian migration to New York and Madrid that explore displacement, and community through collective memory and participatory practices.
ARTIST STATEMENT
YUYANA VIDEO
MUDANZAS VIDEO
TRAYECTOS VIDEO
“One project that opened our minds to programming off site in Corona was initiated by a Quito and NYC-based artist named Maria Teresa Ponce.
She had been working with a group of Ecuadorian “Mudanza” Moving truck drivers who operated out of Corona Plaza, a triangular public space at the corner of 103rd Street and Roosevelt Avenue. Through her art, she was creating a communication system with their families at home, shuttling videos and messages back and forth as she travelled between Ecuador and NYC”
Tom Finkelpearl, Director of Queens Museum
Art As Social Action 1 0 Years of Social Practice Queens, 2021
2002 – 2009
Deshabitados I, II, III
Digitally manipulated pigment prints.
Hospital Eugenio Espejo, Quito Ecuador
A photographic series focused on an abandoned hospital in Ecuador—the Eugenio Espejo Hospital in Quito—transformed through digital intervention into virtual galleries that confront addiction, institutional failure, and the reclamation of public memory.
PDF & ARTIST STATEMENT
“Ponce then resorts to constructing an illusion—not as an end in itself, but as a technical imperative within a ‘site-specific’ work, where the ideal space is a fundamental part of the experience of the piece. In this way, he is able to document an ‘installation’ that never existed; in other words, it is the visual—rather than material—realization of a concept.”
Rodolfo Kronfle Chamber, independent curator
FOTO ECUADOR II
Marzo 6-29/2002
2010
Animal Shot
Animal Shot
Interactive audio-video installation
Quito, Ecuador
Animal Shot is an interactive audio-video installation that invites viewers to photograph native Galápagos animals on screen—only to make them vanish highlighting the environmental consequences of tourism and the desire to capture nature.
PDF & ARTIST STATEMENT
“They aim and shoot at those ‘targets’ which, from their perspective, require urgent extermination in Ecuador: the disruption of the flora and fauna of the Galápagos Islands caused by tourism, maritime traffic, and waste.”
MARÍA BELÉN MONCAYO, independent curator
BANG Exhibition, FLACSO, Ecuador
INFO AND CONTACT
teresitaponce@yahoo.com
+1 786 479 9583 (USA)
I am an Ecuadorian artist, architect, and educator whose interdisciplinary work flows across photography, video, installation, brand design, and architecture. I studied architecture at the University of Notre Dame and earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
For ten years, I served as a full-time professor and head of the Photography Department at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where I led the program’s expansion—updating its curriculum, tripling student enrollment, and bringing national visibility through public exhibitions.
My personal projects are deeply interconnected: from documenting oil pipelines across Latin America in Oleoducto over more than a decade, to designing and running My Sachají, Ecuador’s first wellness hotel rooted in feng shui principles and sustainable architecture. Each project feeds the next, forming a continuous creative ecosystem.
I have had the honor of participating in international biennials and major events such as PhotoEspaña. My work is included in collections such as the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), the Queens Museum, and Fundación El Comercio, and has been featured in publications including The New York Times and several books on contemporary Latin American art.
My current creative endeavor brings together tools for healing through the visual language of brand design. I create minimalist, symbolic systems—often using AI—that make ancestral knowledge more accessible and intuitive. Projects such as an archive of medicinal plants, dream interpretation, and spirit animals blend traditional wisdom with contemporary image-making, offering a space where image and design become a bridge to healing.
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