Paulina Velázquez Solís (1981) was born in Mexico where she grew up under the influence of colorful folk art and traditions. At the age of 17,she moved with her family to her other motherland: Costa Rica, where she found herself surrounded by water and life, and eventually art school. Her influences include illustrated books, folk art, games, toys comics, and visual artists, as well as her love for animals, philosophy and televised animations.
She works primarily in visual art, through media such as video, installation, sculpture, print, interactive technology and live animation with which she references everyday elements, and uses ludic aesthetics and methods to playfully recast the familiar in uncanny spaces.

She began showing work in 2004 in collective art shows, contests and film festivals both in Costa Rica, Central America and internationally.
Since then, she has worked with several different collectives such as Foro GAMA group, Thinktank Media, Grupo CENTRO, the Landings exhibition series, and interdisciplinary collaborations in festivals such as CESTA (Tabor, Czech Republic) and Torino Contemporanea (Torino, Italy).

She has shown her work locally in such places as the Alianza Francesa, 7th Costarican Film Festival, Galeria Nacional and the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo MADC in San José, Costa Rica receiving recognitions such as the selection in the V Bienarte, the local Biennial to represent Costa Rica in the V Central American Biennial in El Salvador in 2006, and First Prize for the Union Latina young visual artists award in 2007.

Her work has been shown also at the SUNY Gallery in New Paltz, New York, Caos Theater in Turin, the Cultural Exchange Station in Tábor, Czech Republic, the MadCat Women’s Film Festival in San Francisco,  the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington DC, Casa de Las Americas in Havanna,Cuba,  Urban Nomad Film Festival in Taiwan and at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan.

She obtained a BFA and Licenciatura in Visual Arts from Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (UNA) in printmaking (2005/2008), and Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts in Studio Practice with a concentration in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in California under a Fulbright Scholarship (2010)