Gabriela Isabel Castillo was born in Colima, Mexico, in 1990.

At the age of six she immigrated to the United States with her two mothers and her younger brother, landing in the greater Los Angeles area.

Castillo earned artistic praise early on, receiving awards for her art as a grade school student. She attended California State University, Fullerton, graduating with a BFA in Drawing & Painting, in 2014. As a student, in 2011-2012, Castillo was also accepted into and attended the historic Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, a school founded in 1563 by Cosimo de Medici, and associated with Renaissance artists including Giorgio Vasari and Michelangelo. 

The Mexican culture that Castillo grew up with shaped her sensibility and visual aesthetic, as did her travels in Mexico, Cuba, Morocco, South Korea, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Belgium. 

Her worldview, and in turn, her work, is informed by the loss and dislocation of the immigrant experience: at once alienated and seduced by American culture, while always holding tight the memories and family of her home country. Castillo’s paintings and drawings are intimate, sensual, and deeply personal; they are her way of making meaning and asserting her presence within a turbulent and constantly changing reality.

Castillo has exhibited her work since 2012, in California and Italy, and in 2018 she was co-founder of a group of artists who call themselves the Independent Painters Association, and who run an alternative exhibition space in downtown Santa Ana called The Painter’s Room.

Her work was shown, most recently, at the Mexican Consulate in Santa Ana, California.