Lisa Abaya is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portugal whose practice investigates the relationships between movement, light, and perception. Her background in classical ballet—thirteen years of training at the San Francisco Ballet School—forms the foundation of her sensitivity to gesture, spatial rhythm, and embodied response, qualities that continue to inform her works.

She earned her BFA through the dual program between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in painting with a minor in printmaking. Driven by a curiosity for cross-disciplinary dialogue, Lisa’s work often intersects with video, sound, and installation. Her multicultural background—Mexican, Serbian, and Chinese—deeply shapes her visual language, grounding her abstractions in traditional symbols and motifs reimagined through a contemporary lens. Her current body of work focuses on the material and conceptual nuances of light. Through a process-oriented approach, she isolates the transient qualities of illumination to articulate the threshold between visibility and perception, offering a meditation on the unseen dimensions of the observable world.