Ileana Lado
Ileana Lado is a first-generation Cuban-Mexican visual artist and educator. Her studio practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography, centered on documentation, lineage, and cultural memory.
A native New Yorker — born in Harlem, raised in The Bronx, and educated in the city's public schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She draws on the full range of the city that raised her: its classrooms and museums, and the countless cultures living side by side that make New York like nowhere else.
Over nearly a decade she has taught learners of every age, treating the arts as a way of understanding yourself, each other, and the world. Today she teaches at the Brooklyn Museum, leading studio classes in drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture for learners ages 6 to 96. She is also an artist-in-residence with the Basquiat Project in NYC Public Schools, where her fifth-grade cohort's paintings will be exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2026.
Through Learning with Lado, she offers small-group classes and one-on-one mentorship for students of every age, including portfolio development for young artists applying to specialized NYC arts high schools.
Before her studio-based work, she taught English Language Arts in Bronx and Harlem public schools, developing culturally responsive curriculum and mentoring Hunter College graduate scholars in lesson planning and instruction. Her teaching is grounded in the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Maxine Greene, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Geneva Gay — thinkers who hold that education is a practice of freedom, that students' lived experiences belong at the center of the classroom, and that critical inquiry and creative work are inseparable. Their ideas shape the three pillars of Artful Learning, her own teaching framework at the heart of every class.
She lives and works in Brooklyn, and is fluent in English and Spanish.
- Teaching ArtistBrooklyn Museum · 2024–Present
- Artist-in-ResidenceThe Basquiat Project · NYC Public Schools · 2025–Present
- Freelance Artist & EducatorCreate Humanity · 2024–Present
- Founder & Lead EducatorLearning with Lado · 2023–Present
- Former ELA Specialist & Clinical InstructorEast Harlem Scholars Academy · 2021–2023
- Former Lead Middle School TeacherAcademic Leadership · The Bronx · 2017–2021
- LanguagesFluent in English & Spanish
That's me in the photo, in my pre-K classroom in the South Bronx.
Everything I do as a teacher began at P.S./M.S. 31. I had teachers there who treated reading, writing, music, and visual art not as subjects to get through, but as ways of being alive in the world — and they gave me a foundational love for all four that has never left me. When I stand in front of a class now, I'm trying to give my students what those teachers gave me.
I've taught first graders learning to write complete sentences, middle schoolers learning to question everything, and adults who haven't held a paintbrush in decades. The students change every semester, but what I believe doesn't: that art is one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding ourselves, each other, and the world we inhabit.
Whether you're six or sixty, picking up paintbrush for the first time or returning after years away, you'll find the same care, the same attention, and the same belief in what you're capable of.
I'd love to support your creative growth.