Olimpia Ortiz was born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba in 1960. She graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in 1980 in the specialties of Painting and Drawing and later worked as a Professor of Painting and Drawing. In 2009, she was recognized as a Distinguished Person of Sancti Spiritus and received the Key to the City.

Olimpia Ortiz explores both figurative and abstract approaches, drawing from diverse aesthetic frameworks. In her constant conceptual explorations and experimentation, she breaks with traditional values of painting in Sancti Spiritus by utilizing a system of particular symbols, sometimes based on the decomposition of planes, numerology, or the recycling of morphological conventions.

She has held numerous solo exhibitions in Cuba and was featured in a solo exhibition at the Walsh Gallery in San Francisco in 2010. She had previously exhibited in Asia. She has also participated in a significant number of group exhibitions since 1998, including at the Westbeth Gallery in New York, the Association of Costa Rican Painters and Sculptors in San Jose, Costa Rica, and the Contemporary Cuban Art Show in Vigo, Spain. She has also exhibited throughout the United States, including at the MOMA in NY with the show “The Grolier of Manhattan,” the Artspace Gallery in New York, Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Lucky Street Gallery in Key West, Florida. Her work has also been exhibited in Europe, including in Bergamo, Italy, and at the NOVART Art Gallery and Valencia Gallery in Madrid, Spain. She has also exhibited in Berlin and in Mexico at the Michoacan Institute of Culture.

Her work has been auctioned at the Cuban Artist Fund, 3d. the Rockefeller Brothers, Throckmorton Fine Arts in New York and Los Angeles, and at Christie’s in London. She won the Third Prize in the Artistic Drawing Biennial Jenaro Perez Villamil of the Bello Piñeiro Museum in Galicia, Spain.