Baker Artist Portfolios

Maria Gabriela Aldana is an interdisciplinary storyteller, bilingual community artist, and educator proudly born in Managua, Nicaragua. A former child asylee and proud immigrant, she has called Baltimore home since 1999. Aldana holds a BFA (2003) and an MA in Community Arts (2006) from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she was part of the institution’s inaugural MA cohort. She is also a certified K–12 Fine Arts educator, earning her teaching credentials from Notre Dame of Maryland University.

Aldana is the co-founding director of Art of Solidarity (www.artofsolidarity.org). For more than 20 years, she has produced community-centered cultural projects including oral histories, murals, exhibitions, parades, festivals, documentary films, and cultural exchange initiatives. Her practice weaves together visual art, storytelling, labor history, migration, and collective memory, centering communities often excluded from dominant narratives.

Her artwork—including the illuminated Gallopinto sign and a self-portrait sculpture—was featured at Bogus Gallery at the Copycat in fall 2024. She earned two Maryland State Arts Council Public Art Across Maryland grants to initiate, plan, and lead Queernesseseseses, the largest LGBTQ public mural in Baltimore, created at Bmore Liberated in Patterson Park in collaboration with community members of all ages and partners including CASA, YouthWorks, Bmore Liberated, and the Patterson Park Neighborhood Association. Aldana was also a featured artist in the Chesapeake Arts Center’s 2025 Latin American Heritage exhibition, Echoes of Our Ancestors.

From 2024–2025, Aldana served as a public art consultant for Asylee Women’s Enterprise’s Steps 2 Success program, facilitating immersive mural arts workshops with recently arrived immigrant youth who survived trafficking. These workshops emphasized cultural pride, drawing, illustration, scale, proportion, and collective storytelling, culminating in the participants’ first public art project.

Aldana’s recent work includes Echoes from the Key Bridge: A Baltimore Longshoreman, an 11-minute documentary film and oral history project that was an official selection of the 2025 Richmond International Film Festival. Her collection of 32 oral histories documenting the aftermath of Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapse is archived at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. She is a recipient of the 2026 Creative Baltimore Fund Mayor’s Individual Artist Award, supporting her forthcoming project Surviving the Key Bridge, which centers the stories of Latin American workers and families two years after the collapse.

In addition to her artistic practice, Aldana serves as a volunteer for the Latino Racial Justice Circle, where she leads the organization’s education scholarship program, and is an active member of the Latino Providers Network.