Ehuana Yaira

Many of them live in the northernmost part of the Brazilian Amazon, in an area slightly larger than Portugal, and they have been legally recognised by the Brazilian state since 1992. Yaira is an artist, teacher and leader of the women's community among the Yanomami of Watorikɨ. Since 2010, she has participated in research on the traditions of Yanomami women, learning from the female elders of Watorikɨ. Over the course of her investigations, she has become familiar with the printing of illustrated texts of publications intended for the school where she teaches. It was through this that she discovered a talent for drawing and began using this medium to depict the activities, knowledge and rituals of the women of the Yanomami. This led to her becoming one of the first Yanomami woman who has pursued a career in the arts, a rarity in itself, yet women occupy a central place in her oeuvre. Her early works consist of illustrating books on medicinal plants, rites around menstruation and the Yanomami languages, all of which were published by the association Yanomami Hutukara. Her drawings generally use dense colours and depict the daily activities of women both inside and outside of the yano (communal house), as well as female shamans, and figures of Yanomami mythology. She was the protagonist of the film  A Film for Ehuana (Louise Botkay, 2018) and also appears in Luiz Bolognesi's film The Last Forest (2021).

Her works were first shown at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2019 in the exhibition Nous les Arbres,  followed by the exhibitions Trees at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (2021), Les Vivants in Lille (2022), and The Yanomami Struggle, in New York at The Shed (2023).