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Sheila Goloborotko's life and career are a testament to resilience, creativity and the power of community.  

The ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ fine arts professor said that though she was born and raised under the hardship of a dictatorial military regime in São Paulo, Brazil, being introduced to art at an early age was a refuge.  

“I was very fortunate to be surrounded by emergent artists dedicated to integrating arts into the progressive curriculum during my formative years,” Goloborotko said. “After-school art classes and creative projects at home further nurtured my artistic inclinations.” 

By age 6, Goloborotko said she was inspired by the landmark buildings in her neighborhood, and decided she wanted to be an architect. 

Goloborotko was immersed in theater, music, visual culture, domestic handicraft and literature. This multidisciplinary approach fostered a sense of “porousness” — absorbing her creative process and allowing her thoughts to flow across different artistic boundaries. 

That trait stayed with her into adulthood. 

“My early years were shaped by a progressive and experimental education that emphasized humanistic values such as social and economic justice, integration and community,” said Goloborotko, who earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Architecture and Urban Design in São Paulo. “Art was a natural part of my upbringing, permeating every aspect of my life.” 

After earning her degree, Goloborotko found it difficult to find work and make a living in Brazil, under what she says was “an autocratic regime with strict censorship, racial and social inequalities.” She decided to immigrate to the U.S. and landed in Brooklyn, New York, where she earned a master's in fine art from Brooklyn College in 1985.  

Later, she found work in a studio that printed for Keith Haring's Pop Shop and became an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College teaching printmaking until 1998. She rented a studio at the Brooklyn Waterfront, later renamed DUMBO. Goloborotko said the studio served as a place where artists with limited exposure to printmaking worked alongside more well-known artists.  

While in architecture school and working on her thesis, Goloborotko created a book illustrating colonialism and the Portuguese occupation of Brazil. She published 30 books and sold out in a gallery opening a week before presenting her thesis. She says that project, along with opening her studio, were the two main factors that helped open doors for her in the art market and kick start her career as a professional artist.  

She began teaching at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2004 and moved her studio to the Red Hook area of Brooklyn in 2009.  

Though Goloborotko’s early education inspired her approach to art, modern and contemporary artists, and architects, along with world events and politics, were influential to her as well.     

“My work had a pivotal transformation in the early 1990s during the AIDS pandemic,” Goloborotko said. “I became an activist, and my work gained an auto-ethnographic tone. I let my work in the printmaking studio speak for AIDS. I created a series of prints, a chain of fragmentary eyes that narrated the fear that my younger brother, who suffered from the disease, was losing his vision and life.”  

She said that before he passed away, her brother wrote the prologue to the portfolio of 10 prints, Eyes That Saw and Became Fish. The series was later purchased by The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection and was exhibited there.  

Goloborotko came to ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ in 2015, to teach printmaking in the Department of Art, Art History and Design.  

As a multidisciplinary artist, she began experimenting with heavy asphalt paving machines in her art and has guided her students through creating large hand-carved woodblocks printed with a steam roller.  

“This collaborative project addresses current issues relevant to students while teaching them valuable skills,” explained Goloborotko. 

Throughout her career, she has embraced new techniques and materials. Her recent work with laser cutters led to an installation for the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum. Although not selected as the winner, the recognition marked a significant milestone in her career. 

Her advice to emerging artists is to keep mastering techniques and developing research and narratives valuable to their community, spirit and soul. 

“Printmaking changed the way I think and make art,” Goloborotko said. “Life, as does the printing press, exerts pressure on us. I feel that I am seeking, through process itself, a kind of redemption, an alchemy by which we, in the artmaking community and the world at large, find — and heal — ourselves and each other.