Astrid Blazsek-Ayala is a Guatemalan artist and economist based in Georgia, United States. She works across various mediums, including collage, photography, painting, sculpture, and video. Her body of work engages with Baroque influences and explores the reinterpretation of mythologies as representations of cultural ideals, serving as a means to better understand the world.

Blazsek-Ayala is best known for studying the shared narratives conveyed in myths.  In her Mythological Imaginaries (2019 – 2020) project, she explores the intersection of one culture with another. The project’s structure was to provide a piñata maker with a written description of certain figures from Greek mythology, along with a printed image of an ancient vase or sculpture depicting the character. The instruction was to create a life-sized piñata based on their interpretation of the mythological creature’s characteristics. For Blazsek-Ayala these piñatas are ephemeral sculptures that, on one hand, represent the creativity and ingenuity of the piñata maker and, on the other hand, allow for a contrast between the imagination of someone from a country with a Mayan cultural heritage, like Guatemala, and the imagination of ancient Greece, a symbol of Western civilization.

In her Judit (2021 – ongoing) project, Blazsek-Ayala revisited the Baroque through the works of Artemisia Gentileschi and Judit Polgár. Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter (1593–1654) who created several versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes. Judit Polgár is considered the greatest woman chess player in the world. The project’s structure focuses on mapping the moves from the iconic 2002 match in which Judit Polgár defeated Gary Kasparov. Blazsek-Ayala developed a series of repetitions of the mental map using different mediums, such as collage, painting, and Chinese ink.

Blazsek-Ayala has a PhD in Economics from the University of Navarre, Spain (2010), and holds a degree in Advanced Studies in Photography and Management of Photographic Projects from La Fototeca and the University of San Carlos de Guatemala (2016).  In 2020, she had solo exhibitions of her Mythological Imaginings project at the HeadOn Photo Festival (Sydney, Australia) and the Antigua Tipografía Sánchez & De Guise (Guatemala City, Guatemala). Her work has participated in collective exhibitions in Australia at the HeadOn Photo Festival (2021) and Guatemala in Espacio Satélite (2018, 2019), Museo Arte Guatemala (2018), and Fototropía (2016).  Her work is part of the publication Prisma Volumen II (2018).  In 2017, she co-founded the Collective Agalma, Guatemala.