Ileana Lado
Ileana Lado is a first-generation Cuban-Mexican visual artist and educator. She works across painting in both traditional and digital media, printmaking, and photography, and has exhibited her work in shows across Brooklyn. Her practice centers on documentation, lineage, and cultural memory, taking the city that raised her as a muse and returning to a few themes again and again: artistic influence, her own Cuban and Mexican roots, and our bond with the land, the sense that we are not separate from nature but a part of it.
A native New Yorker, born in Harlem, raised in The Bronx, and schooled in the city's public classrooms, she draws on the whole of New York: its museums and galleries, and the countless cultures living side by side that make it like nowhere else.
Ileana is a working artist and a dedicated educator, and she does not keep the two apart. The studio sharpens her teaching, and the classroom deepens her work. For nearly a decade she has taught learners of every age, treating art as a way of understanding ourselves, one another, and the world. Today she teaches at the Brooklyn Museum, leading studio classes in drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture for 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.
Ileana came to teaching from psychology, drawn to how people think, learn, and grow, and to what art can do for us. Before her studio-based work she taught English Language Arts in Bronx and Harlem public schools, building culturally responsive curriculum and mentoring Hunter College graduate scholars in lesson planning and instruction. Her teaching is grounded in 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 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
The photo here is my favorite photo of myself. It's me in my pre-K classroom in the South Bronx.
Everything I do as a teacher is influenced by my time 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. [Special shout out to Ms. Pascale!] 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, I'd love to support your creative growth.