Zulmira Oliva

Painter and poet. She completed her secondary education at the Liceu de Faro and her primary teacher training course in the same city. Gifted in the arts, she went on to study drawing and painting with Flávia de Monsaraz, attended an Aesthetics course with Salete Tavares, and spent time at the School of Graphic Arts at ARCO from 1973 to 1978, while devoting herself to arts education pedagogy and research in multidisciplinary areas bridging anthropology and aesthetics. The regime change called on her to assist in drafting plastic expression curricula for secondary education, after which she tried teaching Visual Education at the Primary Teacher Training School of Lisbon, now the Higher School of Education. The draw of research proved stronger, and she set off with a Gulbenkian Foundation grant to the Azores, France, Southern Africa, Spain, and Italy. She held several solo and group exhibitions in Lisbon, Porto, Estoril, and Sintra. She is represented in museums and private collections. Her talent has been divided between painting and poetry, in which case the free, rhythmic way she composes, unconcerned with formal rules or stylistic rigors, is much appreciated. Zulmira Oliva retreated to Sintra, where she lives in communion with nature, in a kind of hermitage of spiritual reflection.