elisa durán-ballén is a multidisciplinary artist and maker from Guayaquil, Ecuador.

She received a BA in Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University, and currently lives between DC and her native Guayaquil.

Working across and beyond ceramics, textiles, social practice, performance, and photography, her practice is an ongoing investigation of the unique ability of human touch, care, and connection to bridge the gap between the miraculous and the mundane. 

In my work, I prioritize materials that retain a closeness to the earth. My process is primarily grounded in tactile intuition while borrowing from long traditions of manual craft to create pieces that inexorably link the body to the product of its labor. The studio becomes a site of communion where materials such as clay, light, and natural fibers can be transformed into expansive agents of co-creation.


Everything has the potential to become something else. Anything made by human hands holds part of the collective spirit within. Objects, like our physical bodies, are perpetually in transit, subject to the same forces of nature that erode, alchemize, and transform. These beliefs sustain my impulse for making, my love for craft and communal practices, and my constant attempts to capture, stretch and constrict time illuminating how it manifests both in the body and in the human-made objects we care for during our overlapping but ultimately transient lifetimes.”