Isabella Mellado (b. 1996, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Chicago) is a painter whose work embraces Catholicism, occult spirituality, queer identity, and the Puerto Rican diasporic experience. Working primarily in oil, she draws on the traditions of religious Renaissance and Medieval painting, Magical Realism, and Mexican Surrealism; as well as painters like Remedios Varo and Hieronymus Bosch, whose work, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's prose, transforms lived experience through the aesthetics of the otherworldly. This is the tradition in which Mellado locates her own practice: a visual language that holds the duality of transnational life and queer community in tension, affirmed by what lies beyond the rational.

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Mellado's process is theatrical in structure. She begins each work with meticulous planning: conceiving a narrative, sourcing costumes and props (often papier-mâché masks and modified found objects) and organizing staged photoshoots on location or in the studio. The resulting images are collaged into a single composition that serves as the reference for a final oil painting. Her work is rooted in symbolism drawn from tarot, astrology, Puerto Rican folklore, and the iconography of Catholic devotional painting.

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Mellado’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Museo de los Santos y Arte Nacional, San Juan (2026); Galeria La Cometa, Miami (2025); Povos Gallery, Chicago (2024); and Walter Otero Contemporary Art, San Juan (2023), among others. Group exhibitions include Master Class, Secrist | Beach (2025); Liminal, National Museum of Puerto Rican Art and Culture, Chicago (2024); Botany of Desire, Swivel Gallery, New York (2023); and Skin + Masks, Kavi Gupta, Chicago (2022), among many others. Mellado's work is collected by the National Museum of Puerto Rican Art and Culture, Chicago; the Collection of Patricia Cisneros, and numerous other private collections. The Artist has also participated in residencies at Fountainhead, Miami (2025); Vermont Studio Center (2019); Mass MoCA (2018), and more. Mellado received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023.