Firelei Báez was born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, and lives and works in New York, NY. She received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and an MFA from Hunter College. In her paintings, drawings, and installations, Báez draws upon a wide range of African diasporic histories, reworking visual imagery from sources such as Dominican folklore, 18th-century taxonomy, and the Black Panther movement in order to reclaim power and imagine new possibilities for the future.