Within this website, Polly celebrates over 50 years of life in Mexico. Born in New York in 1959, her family moved to San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico in 1973.

She draws from elements of Mexico´s exuberant natural landscape, folk art, craft and poignant personal memory .

With a formal training in printmaking, painting and surface design, overlapping un unexpected patinas of process and time erupt on the surface of her work. Her paper pieces delve into memories of childhood as an expatriate child growing up in a small Mexican hilltown all while playing with fragments of stories of a young woman´s place in an exotic, unfamiliar yet thoroughly thrilling , often surreal surrounding.

Polly Stark Ortega attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and majored in printmaking and ceramics there. She then returned to San Miguel de Allende and married her husband, musician Victorino Ortega . Together they raised three children in San Miguel, juggling instruments, babies, canvases while pursuing their respective creative careers. Their small house was a revolving door of neighborhood children, music rehearsals, painting, legos, jacket fabric piecework, homework and pets, from parrots to cats, dogs to mice and lizards.

For several years, Polly was a professor of printmaking at the Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramirez El Nigromante “Bellas Artes”, and also at the Instituto Allende .

She has exhibited widely throughout Mexico in group and solo exhibitions as well as juried national exhibitions .