Marielena Ferrer is a multi-media visual artist studying art at the University of New Paltz.  She is fully engaged in the Kingston community where she currently resides.  She is the executive director of Humanamente, a diversity and inclusion consulting organization.  On view in Collecting Memories is her installation of a series of butterflies that appear to be flying out of a cage, a reference to immigrant children caged in immigration centers in the United States.  The installation is titled, Broken Monarchs, (Monarchs meaning a type of butterfly). Ferrers’ drawings, and paintings were exhibited at the Muroff-Kotler Visual Arts Gallery in SUNY Ulster in 2019; and at the Plaza Gallery of SUNY Albany, until August 2020.  Her sculptures have been exhibited in Caracas, Venezuela; Valencia, Spain; Chicago, Poughkeepsie and Kingston, New York. In Kingston, in 2020 Ferrer juried the Cornell Creative Arts Center’s first exhibition, We’re All Humans, and inaugurated The D.R.A.W.’s new studio at Energy Square with her art-installation, Masking Identities: Rebuilding Deterritorialized Cultural Memories, a provocative analysis of the complexity of migrants’ narratives and experiences. Ferrer studied architecture at Central University of Venezuela. Following her studies at the university, among other distinctions, she earned a certificate of distinction in “Leadership and Empowerment” from Spain’s Polytechnic University of Valencia and a diploma in “Gender Leadership” through the EQUAL Transnational Cooperation Community Initiative of the European Social Fund.