Mishel Valenton is a Filipino-American immigrant artist currently living in Richmond, VA. She was born in Manila in 1982 and graduated from the University of the Philippines with a focus in Studio Arts in 2004. She migrated to the United States the same year. Her work focuses on color-centric, expressive figuration, with her latest paintings exploring the intersection of the personal and the political. Mishel has shown in group exhibitions across the U.S., and most recently in a two-person exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont.

"I paint to experience connection. My paintings are a way to transform this fragmented understanding of a burning world into something more whole, at least for a moment in time. They serve as an escape from the captive spectatorship of the violence feed into the tenderness of a shared humanity. By painting these figures, I am able to hold them within myself, in their imagined truths, with more compassion. They resist, oppose, despair, hope, and help, as people do, but within the simultaneity of painting"