Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza

Born in 1978 in Quito (Ecuador), Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza is an artist.

A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she has participated in several post-graduate programs at the ENSBA in Lyon and Paris. Among her distinctions, she was awarded the Prix Ardoin (Institut de France, Académie des Beaux-Arts) in 2007 and the Mariano Aguilera Prize for Contemporary Art (Municipality of Quito, Ecuador) in 2014. In 2019, she was nominated for the Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard.

Her project at Villa Medici is entitled The Invisible Cities (Carmen) and takes as its starting point a double story linking the memory of a woman who disappeared in the early 1980s in Ecuador and the evocative presence of a painting painted more than a century ago. All of the works produced during the residency will constitute a sort of “logbook” narrating the artist’s journey in Rome following in the footsteps of these ghosts.