BIOGRAPHY

Susana Aldanondo (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an Argentine-American artist who lives and works in New York City.

Working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, her practice explores abstraction in relation to music, migration, and cultural memory. Drawing on visual traditions from Buenos Aires and structures of rhythm, repetition, and improvisation, her work engages questions of identity, belonging, and translation between sound and image.

Aldanondo received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where she studied with Will Cotton and José de Jesús Rodríguez, and an MA in Public Art and Culture from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires. She earned a Fine Arts Diploma in Painting from The Art Students League of New York, where she studied with Larry Poons, Ronnie Landfield, and Ron Davis, and participated in seminars with Frank Stella and Knox Martin. She completed a residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the New York Academy of Art, conducting research on European and American painting before joining the Museum’s copyist program. Her residencies also include the School of Visual Arts and an international residency in Iceland.

Her work has been presented in collaboration with musicians and composers affiliated with Juilliard, Columbia University, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, AvanTango, Suarez-Paz Tango, and Central Park Tango.

Aldanondo has received the Marie Theresa Lammoglia Virata Family Collection Graduate Scholarship; the Susan Wasserstein Patron of the Arts Award, Merit Scholarship in Painting, and the Leonard Rosenfeld Award in Abstract Painting from The Art Students League of New York; awards and scholarships from the New York Academy of Art; awards from the National Association of Women Artists in New York.

Aldanondo's work has been shown in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Steinberg Museum, the Susquehanna Museum, Queens College, Taller Boricua, Kino Saito Art Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, Halsey McKay Gallery through the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Susan Eley Fine Art Gallery (Lower East Side) and others.

Aldanondo’s abstract work takes the viewer into a symphonic repertoire of visual expressions informed by the compositions of renowned music maestros, as well as contemporary music. In an energetic dance between line and color, she guides the eye through a rhythmic and geometric journey. She often paints to music leading to a composition that embodies music into the visual realm.

Her figurative work draws inspiration from ancient art, mythology, shaped primarily from her own imagination using an identifying color palette and symbolism.  Intrigued by the possibilities of the unseen her work highlights a spiritual world, mythology throughout history.  Her work seeks to celebrate female empowerment.


Aldanondo draws inspiration from her Latin-American roots’ in Buenos Aires’ ‘fileteado’ as a starting point for her gestural abstract paintings that reinterpret her own experience as an immigrant and new generation of Americans.  

Her figurative work is informed by research and the embodiment of ancient art, the imaginary, and the immigrant experience.  It is rooted in simplicity of form while working with limited colors to build clear emotional stories, rather than realistic images .

She was awarded a Scholarship Grant by the Marie Theresa Lammoglia Virata Family Collection to attend graduate school.  In past years she also won a juried competition, juried by the Milken Family Foundation: Milken Family Foundation Juried selection juried by Benedict Leca, PH.D., Executive Director at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum, Norah Diedrich, Executive Director at the Newport Art Museum, Qianni Zhu, Mirlen Family Postbaccalaureate Fellow in Museum Practice, Colby College Museum. 

Her trajectory has been reviewed by Art Daily News (Mexico and worldwide), Forbes Latin-America in Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador and Uruguay, Artland Magazine in Denmark, and by local NYC based contemporary art magazines such as Hyperallergic and WhiteHot Magazine, and in Europe by Artland Magazine, and Alpi Fashion Magazine in Rome, Italy, mentions Linea Magazine by The Art Students League of New York.

Her connection to music has led to collaborations with independent musicians of the Juilliard Music School in New York as well as scholars and composers of Columbia University. Other collaborations exploring sound and visual arts include the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, the T. Dimitrov Jazz Quartet, the Noa Fort Quartet in an exploration of improvised reactions to music and the visual art forms; Aldanondo painted to live to the music of the musicians and composers who also improvised their music inspired by Aldanondo’s painting; exploring the human experience related to sound in the present moment as part of an exhibition “Sound & Sight: A Duet” presented by The Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and curated by NAscentNY in a private event and exhibition in Brooklyn Heights, NY.
As part of another exhibition, she was invited to paint to tango by AvanTango and Grammy nominee Pablo Aslan at the Lower East Side, New York.
She collaborated with New York City based tango orchestras such as Suarez-Paz Tango during their celebratory events of the centennial honoring renowned tango composer, Astor Piazzolla, and was a contributing artist during their Tango Gala Benefit at the Consulate of Argentina in New York.
Occasionally, she collaborates with Central Park Tango, in Central Park, New York, where for the past few years she has painted, inspired by the music, the dancers, and the location, where she is drawn for the spontaneity, inclusion, and diversity abounds and that is welcomed, something she believes is representative of the culture of tango at its core.

Aldanondo is a former member as well as former Board Member and Chair of Social Media of the historic New York Society of Women Artists, an organization recognized by the State of New York as a historical organization.  

She's a current member of The Art Students League of New York.

Aldanondo can sometimes be found painting in the public space of SoHo, New York, where she paints on a wall where she has been painting for several years as performative and political active statement.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION 

The Virata Family Collection and The Marie Theresa Lammoglia Virata Family Award in Painting 

NYAA Scholar Scholarship Award 

Susan Wasserstein Patron of the Arts Scholar Award NYAA

Merit Scholarship Award Winner in Abstract Painting - The Art Students League of New York

The Leonard Rosenfeld Award - through the generosity of the Leonard Rosenfeld Fund and Leonard Rosenfeld’s wife, through The Art Students League of New York selected by jurors of The Museum of Modern Art in NYC (MoMA)  for said scholarship.  Jurors:  Mitra Abbaspour PhD., MoMA,  James Lee  PS1MoMA for said scholarship.  

James Little Student Exhibition - Honorable Mention 

Larry Poons Student Exhibition - Red Dot winner * by professors & peers.

Opera Show Honorable mention by Yukako (Hong Kong & New York)

Hamptons Fine Art Fair Chief Curator’s Best In Booth Award 

Hamptons Fine Art Fair Chief Curator’s Picks Award 

National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) Abstract Painting Juried Award Winner

Jackson’s Painting Prize (London, UK) Long-listed

Samsung USA - Featured artist 

ArtScope Magazine - Competition Winner. Juried by The Milken Family Foundation, The Newport Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum. 

SPECIAL FEATURES 

CBS - The Equalizer, featuring three works curated by - Hollywood Art Curator & Art Advisor.

SAMSUNG USA - Finalist, featured on Samsung USA

PRESS

COLLABORATIONS

  • Airstream Inc., AirLab, CartDept.

  • Musicians of the Juilliard School of Music

  • Brooklyn Conservatory of Music

  • Pablo Aslan (AvanTango)

  • Triffon Dimitrov Jazz Quartet

  • NYC based tango orchestras

  • Central Park Tango

  • NascentNY Advisory

  • Cuquita the Cuban Doll

  • La Maison de Beaumont, where Aldanondo selected and sponsored five fellow artists for a paid artist residency in France

  • The Brooklyn Review

  • Pause, Performance Art USA & NYC Cultural Affairs curated by Hector Canonge

  • Noah Fort Jazz Quartet

  • Astoria Park - Trifón Dimitrov Quartet Astoria Park Alliance & Queens Rising - Astoria Park Musical Walk 

  • Piazzolla 100 - Centennial Celebration held at Roosevelt Island, New York, presented by Suarez Paz Tango

  • Brooklyn Review:  Visual Art & Poetry

  • Latin-American Poets Miguel Angel Zapata and NYC Poetry City College, Hofstra University, BiCOA,  during Friends of Hugo Bastidas Exhibition where Aldanondo participated