Here Tomorrow, 2003 Shadowtracing, 1998

A native of Bogot, Colombia, Paola Cabal moved to the U.S. with her family as a young child. An artist whose practice is divided between gallery and public projects, Cabal earned her BFA in visual art from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she was awarded a Carnegie Centennial Award by the city's Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History for a public mural project she completed there. Cabal was artist in residence at the Gimnasio del Norte School in Bogot, Colombia before completing her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, Omaha, Ft.Lauderdale, and-most recently-Charleston, SC, as well as in Bogot, Colombia.

In 2006, Paola was one of three recipients of the prestigious Dreihaus Foundation Emerging Artist Award. She is currently at work on a public project in Chicago, where she lives and works.

More of Paola's work can be found at here.

"As opposed to previous situations with teenagers that were educationally oriented, Blue Sky Project's model of collaborating with youth over a substantial span of time in order to address specific problems closely linked to my own practice was amazing. It was an adjustment, for sure: whereas in educational situations, I very much strive to background my own inquiries on order to facilitate student's work, here I had to consciously foreground my own thinking in order to spur the project forward, but, I mean, it was awesome. I can envision keeping in touch with both my assistant and youth participants and continuing to work with them in an artistic capacity.

Every other experience I have had working with youth has been bracketed and limited by numerous restrictions. I appreciated the Blue Sky Project's willingness to accommodate all different kinds of activities and forms of investigation. There was never a hard and fast, "no," rather, it was very much, "let's see how this can be accomplished"