Graça Morais

She was born in Vieiro (Trás-os-Montes), in the deep interior of Portugal in 1948. She graduated in Painting from “Escola de Belas Artes” at Oporto in 1971. Her first individual exhibition took place in 1974, at “Museu Alberto Sampaio”, in Guimarães. In 1972 she founded the “Grupo Puzzle”. Between 1977 and 1979 she lived in Paris with a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation. In 1983, invited by the same foundation, she participated at the “São Paulo Biennale”, as the Portuguese representative.   In 1991 she received the “SOCTIP - Artist of the Year prize".   During 1993 she began to work with ceramic panels. During the same period, she made the sceneries for a play by Jean Genet.   She is responsible for the tiles in the subway stations of “Intendente”, in Lisbon and “Belarus” in Moscow. In 2005, she held an artist residency at “Centro de Artes de Sines". She has been working with Portalegre Tapestries Manufacture since 1990.