Natasha Moraga

Natasha Moraga is an American-born Mexican tile artist who specializes in the trencadis technique. She has created a number of murals in Puerto Vallarta, and is currently working on a project (Parque de los Azulejos) to completely cover the Lázaro Cárdenas Park in tiles. Her work method is community-based, and she started Mosayko Vallarta to organize volunteer participation in projects.

Biography Natasha Moraga was born in La Mirada, California, to a Mexican mother and Chilean father. She has American and Mexican citizenship, the latter through her mother. For a time she lived a nomadic lifestyle and lived with different friends. With one of these friends, she lived in Germany and visited Barcelona, where she discovered the trencadís work of Antoni Gaudí in 2005. Moraga wanted to be an artist, and the tile work interested her because of its highly tactile nature. Despite the time in Philadelphia, she did not go into art right away. Her father, a businessman in Puerto Vallarta, convinced her to open a restaurant. She ran it for two years before she decided it was not what she wanted to do and she shut it down in 2010.

Her second project was done in the Marina Vallarta neighborhood on Albatros Street near the American School. This project ran from 2013 to 2015. The mural, called Episodio 2 is over and is the second-largest mosaic mural in Mexico.

The Parque de Azulejos (lit. "Tile Park") project began in 2017 and coincided with the 100th anniversary of the founding of Puerto Vallarta. It is located at Lázaro Cárdenas Park. Moraga stated: "I always passed by here and saw it dark, falling down and needing color."

Mozayko Vallarta The Parque de Azulejos project marked a change of Moraga's projects to a community-focused and community-organized model.