Kimberly Fulton Orozco is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes painting, printmaking, and conceptual installation. Her work interrogates the psychic aftershocks of assimilation and the social architectures that shape — and sometimes shatter — our sense of belonging. It is as much about survival as it is about vision: a quiet resistance that draws on beauty, precision, and ancestral knowledge to reimagine the systems that govern us, and to envision liberty beyond them.

Born in Ridgecrest, California, Fulton Orozco is a Raven from the Yakhw’ Jaanaas clan of Craig, Alaska and a citizen of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. She was given the name Sáandlaanaay — “first light” — a name rooted in Haida oral tradition and cosmology. Her lineage is woven from Kaigani Haida, Mexican immigrant, and Scottish settler ancestry. This complex heritage informs a body of work deeply attentive to cultural memory and the conditions of disconnection and return.

At the core of her practice is a belief in visual language as a vessel of shared understanding — a structure that carries ancestral philosophies forward through the somatic practice of form. These principles, rooted in ancient creative processes, function not only as aesthetic choices but also as tools for navigating the present: strategies for resilience, reflection, and transformation.

Fulton Orozco’s compositions often balance formal tension and spiritual coherence, revealing patterns of displacement, diaspora, and resistance encoded in form. Whether evoking the ceremonial or the structural, her pieces are inquiries into how we hold ourselves — and each other — within histories of rupture and transformation.

She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a BFA in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Georgia State University. In 2023, she became the first artist tribally affiliated artist participate in the United States Mint’s Artistic Infusion Program — a role that reflects the evolving place of Indigenous artists in shaping national visual culture.

Fulton Orozco is also a mother of two, a role that informs her work’s ongoing engagement with inheritance, responsibility, and the generational transmission of knowledge. Through her art, she continues a tradition of cultural perpetuation that is both rigorous and deeply felt — a practice shaped by gratitude, guided by history, and committed to what remains possible.