Lara Branca is a native to Colorado, born in Denver in 1975. Her school-year, city upbringing was contrasted by summers at Girl Scout camp, where she developed a deep love for wilderness, the land, and horses. Her life has been shaped by traveling and living in wild places, as well as for interpreting these experiences through visual art.
Lara earned her BA in Painting with Honors from Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO in 2006, and earned her MFA in Painting from AAU, San Francisco in 2016. Her Masters Thesis series “Wind of Heaven” explored the idea of horses moving through landscapes, both real and imagined.
Her current series “Nomadic Soul” fuses elements of landscape, equine form and visual travel journaling to explore essential human questions of roaming and longing for “home”. She works in rural SW Colorado, where she pursues a plein air paintingpractice and documents her life with rescue horses.
In 2018 she showed at Telluride HQ Gallery, in Telluride, CO. "Nomadic Soul" showed during the Spring of 2019 at Olio in Mancos, Colorado. She welcomes inquiries about her work.