Biography
Samantha da Silva (b. 1978) is a third-generation artist whose large-scale abstract paintings emerge from a lifetime of migration, rupture, and radiant renewal.
Raised in São Paulo, Brazil (with roots in coastal Santos), she immigrated to Canada at age ten, beginning a journey of over forty moves shaped by natural disasters, love, and circumstance. A pivotal chapter took her to Hawaii, where she built an off-grid homestead deepened by the 2018 Kīlauea eruption, before rooting anew in Utah’s red deserts.
Da Silva collaborates directly with the land: floating canvases on the Great Salt Lake, exposing them to sun, wind, rain, or burial; embedding foraged earth, sand, salt, and sacred pigments into thick, textured layers. Her relief-like surfaces evoke cracked desert floors and topographic maps—visual hymns to belonging, spirituality, resourcefulness, and the sacredness of place. Each painting is an alchemical act: transmuting personal upheaval into universal resonance.
A full-time artist and educator with nearly two decades of experience, da Silva leads transformative workshops and retreats that treat painting as fearless energy work and emotional initiation. She has taught in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and France, and brings art as healing to youth, seniors, and veterans through community partnerships.
Recipient of the 2026 Utah Individual Artist Advancement Grant and multiple residencies, her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Bravo TV, HGTV, and galleries internationally. One of her poems is permanently inscribed in Salt Lake City’s Sidewalk Poetry project.
Through her art and teaching, da Silva invites others to clear their channels, embrace the divine surge, and create—truthful, gentle, and fearless.
Raised in São Paulo, Brazil (with roots in coastal Santos), she immigrated to Canada at age ten, beginning a journey of over forty moves shaped by natural disasters, love, and circumstance. A pivotal chapter took her to Hawaii, where she built an off-grid homestead deepened by the 2018 Kīlauea eruption, before rooting anew in Utah’s red deserts.
Da Silva collaborates directly with the land: floating canvases on the Great Salt Lake, exposing them to sun, wind, rain, or burial; embedding foraged earth, sand, salt, and sacred pigments into thick, textured layers. Her relief-like surfaces evoke cracked desert floors and topographic maps—visual hymns to belonging, spirituality, resourcefulness, and the sacredness of place. Each painting is an alchemical act: transmuting personal upheaval into universal resonance.
A full-time artist and educator with nearly two decades of experience, da Silva leads transformative workshops and retreats that treat painting as fearless energy work and emotional initiation. She has taught in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and France, and brings art as healing to youth, seniors, and veterans through community partnerships.
Recipient of the 2026 Utah Individual Artist Advancement Grant and multiple residencies, her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Bravo TV, HGTV, and galleries internationally. One of her poems is permanently inscribed in Salt Lake City’s Sidewalk Poetry project.
Through her art and teaching, da Silva invites others to clear their channels, embrace the divine surge, and create—truthful, gentle, and fearless.