Atelier Joana Vasconcelos

Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese contemporary visual artist born in 1971 with a 30-year career built around monumental sculptures. Her Lisbon-based studio, the Atelier Joana Vasconcelos (located in the Alcântara district), manages over 50 employees and has operated since 2006. The hangar-like workspace overlooks the Tagus River port, populated with monumental sculptures, sketches, mock-ups, and teams weaving, beading, crocheting, strategizing, and designing. Her work fuses craftsmanship, popular culture, and monumental scale, transforming everyday objects into immersive sculptural environments. Her mixed-media sculptures—built primarily in various textiles—explore themes of identity, gender, heritage, and collective memory through a distinctly baroque vocabulary. The youngest artist and only woman to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles (2012), her exhibition was France's most-visited in 50 years. In 2018, she became the first Portuguese artist to exhibit at Guggenheim Bilbao with a major retrospective.