Background
Sheila Maureen Bisilliat was born on February 16, 1931 in Surrey, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of the painter Sheila Brannigan (1914 - 1994) and a diplomat.
Sheila Maureen Bisilliat was born on February 16, 1931 in Surrey, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of the painter Sheila Brannigan (1914 - 1994) and a diplomat.
Sheila Maureen Bisilliat studied painting with André Lhote in Paris, in 1955, and at New York's Art Students League with Morris Kantor in 1957.
Sheila Maureen Bisilliat came to Brazil for the first time in 1952, esblishing herself in 1957, in the city of São Paulo. From 1962, she abandoned painting and began to dedicate herself to photography. She worked as a photojournalist for Editora Abril, between 1964 and 1972 - in the magazine Quatro Rodas but became especially prominent in the defunct magazine Realidade.
Between 1972 and 1992, together with her second husband, the Frenchman Jacques Bisilliat, and the architect Antonio Marcos Silva, founded the O Bode folk art gallery. During this period, she travelled through Brazil in search of works by popular artists and craftsmen, to compose the gallery's collection. Also at that time, in 1988, at the request of the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, Maureen, Jacques and Antônio Marcos are invited to work in the formation of the Latin American popular art collection of the Fundação Memorial da América Latina in São Paulo. For this, the three traveled through Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay, collecting pieces for the permanent collection of the Memorial's Creativity Pavilion, from which Maureen has since become a curator.
Quotations: "Brazil was a search for roots which I did not have as a child. I was born in England, yes, but I lived in many places. My father was a diplomat, which forced me to live a sort of a chameleonic life . Fate tied me to Brazil. It was a willfull stay."