YA LA’FORD (b. 1979, Bronx, NY) is an artist, educator, and foremost a transporter—working between the visual and the complexities of the human community with layered meanings—through a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, and sound. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from The Art Institute of Boston and holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. As a first-generation American, she moves between her Jamaican heritage and vulnerable communities using the power of art as a universal language. Ya La'ford's mission is to create art and experiences, to immeasurably transform and revolutionize the social, cultural, and historical contexts of creative expression within the human journey. La’ford’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Vinik Family Foundation, and Nike. She has notably exhibited at the Tampa Museum of Art, the Orlando Museum of Fine Art, the Asia Contemporary Art Show, Venice Biennale Activation Projects, the Yeelen Gallery, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Her work can be found as sculpture, installation, mural design, and exterior façades with a focus on the language of geometric design, symbols, and ethnography to recreate the connections of space and the divine intervention paths that preserve our destinies as individuals and as a community.