Amaru Ro-aguilar

Since she was very young, Amaru showed a great ability for creating things by drawing, sewing, and building. Throughout her school years, she excelled at daydreaming. Even though school was not a welcoming place for imaginative children like her, art was one of the subjects she truly enjoyed. While pursuing a construction degree in college, she decided to take drawing lessons at the School of Fine Arts in Vina del Mar. Later she discovered street theater and dropped out of college to work on the streets of Santiago. Performing with TEUCO and Sociedad Anonima, two street theater troupes, was her first real art school. Mask and prop designing, dance and singing, stilt walking, acrobatics and acting were part of everyday training for performances, giving Amaru a tremendous experience in the arts. Living under a dictatorship, which brutally repressed any sign of dissent, marked her understanding of the power of art. Thus, aesthetics, content and function concepts regarding artistic expression were imbued during these years. In 1992 she moved to Minneapolis, USA and while working as a mime and Spanish teacher, she studied and obtained a bachelor's degree in Theatre Arts and an MFA with a concentration in painting and drawing. Currently she works as a painter in Concon, Chile.