Elia Alba (1962) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Queens, New York. Alba's ongoing project The Supper Club depicts contemporary artists of color in portraits, and presents dinners where a diverse array of artists, curators, historians and collectors address topics related to people of color and to women. Early life and education Born in Brooklyn in 1962, her family is from the Dominican Republic. In the late 1980s Alba began photographing her friend's small dance company which led to photographing other dance and opera companies throughout New York City. A few years after Alba began working on sculpture. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. That same year Alba produced works on the theme of identity and person-hood (e.g. "Doll-head, hand held"). Photography Elia Alba's work has been exhibited and screened at national and international institutions, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; El Museo del Barrio; The RISD Museum; Valencia Institute of Modern Art, IVAM, Spain; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; ARCO, Madrid; Jersey City Museum; Science Museum, London; and ITAU Cultural Institute, São Paulo, Brazil, and the Havana Biennial. In 1999 she began using photo transfer on fabric, creating body parts and masks that when staged in photography and video, play with notions of fantasy, surrealism, place, identity and gender. As often grotesque yet playful sculptures they present alternative realities and personas whose gestures and postures resist classification. Alba began to do portraiture in 2012. In art historian Maurice Berger's continuing New York Times explorations of the relationship between race and photographic depiction of race, he outlines Alba's reimagining of artists of color as A-list celebrities, giving them a place of honor in a mainstream art world that continues to ignore or play down their accomplishments. He quotes Alba's own observation,"These portraits go beyond merely a record of the subject," and convey "a deeper meaning or vision of the sitter, through their art." For these portraits Alba began by choosing an assortment of backdrops, props, and costumes that would accentuate the sitters' personae. These would subtly highlight the artist's contributions to the cultural landscape. In an interview with Jane Ursula Harris, Alba discusses the goal as being not just to document the artists in a straightforward manner or depict their working studios but to tell