Elsa Núñez (born 1943) is a Dominican abstract artist whose work spans more than 50 years. Elsa is the daughter of Mercedes Castillo de Núñez and Ramón Antonio Núñez. Her mother was a high school teacher, and her father served as a general in the Dominican military. Elsa's parents had 12 children and raised them in a strict Catholic environment during the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship. During her years in college, where she studied philosophy, Nuñez joined student-led political movements while, during the military intervention, her brother was killed. Nuñez’s work has run the gamut of artistic styles, from expressionism to abstraction, but the underlying themes remain constant. Sometimes Nuñez turns outward, toward the social conditions of everyday workers in the Dominican Republic or pays tribute to the women who toppled the Trujillo dictatorship. The acrylic painter also envisions female figures and their turbulent inner minds, according to Christina Noriega. Education Núñez studied at Colegio María Auxiliadora, which was led by Salesian nuns, and in 1955, the Salesian sisters urged Núñez's father to enroll her in the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. Núñez's artistic gifts influenced the school's director and reputed painter Gilberto Hernández Ortega (1924–1979) to enroll young Elsa in the academy. Núñez graduated from Instituto de señoritas Salomé Ureña in 1961 with her high school diploma. She studied art at the National School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1962 as a drawing teacher. She attended Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, where she graduated with a degree in Philosophy. In 1970, she moved overseas to Madrid, Spain, where she completed a post-graduate at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Career Núñez's first solo exhibition appeared in 1963 and received warm praise from local critics. That same year, she joined the Grupo Los Tres (1963–1965) with artists Cándido Bidó (1938–2011) and Lepe (Leopoldo Pérez, 1937), a collective that paid tribute to Grupo Los Cuatro, which had been formed years before by her professors Colson, Gausachs, Hernández Ortega, and Clara Ledesma (1924–1999). "Her early work starting in the first decade of her professional career is characterized by powerful subjects that evoke the human condition, the nature of being, life’s fragility, death, social contrasts, poverty, despair, abuse of power, and the dark outlook of her generation." While living in Madrid for her postgraduate studies during the 1970s, she modeled for the photographer Cristina García Rodero and met her