Camilla Martin is an artist, art historian, and professor whose work is rooted in a lifelong fascination with horses, animals, landscape, and the relationship between lived experience and the visual world.

Raised in the Denver area against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, Camilla grew up surrounded by the imagery of the American West—horses, cowboys, and expansive landscapes. Captivated by horses from an early age, she began drawing them as a child. Her interest in art was recognized early when, in the third grade, her art teacher selected her painting of a bobcat for a citywide elementary exhibition at the Colorado Institute of Art in Denver. She later attended the Institute, studying Visual Communications.

After moving to Northern New Mexico, Camilla returned to college to study fine art, earning an associate degree from Northern New Mexico College and a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico. Her studies expanded her practice beyond drawing and painting to include ceramics, printmaking, and traditional Río Grande weaving. In 2022, she earned an MA in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from Academy of Art University in San Francisco, followed by an MA in Art History in 2025.

Camilla is Assistant Professor of Art and Art Program Coordinator at the University of New Mexico–Los Alamos. She is also beginning doctoral research in Art History at the University of Edinburgh, where her research examines women, horses, travel, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Orientalism, with particular emphasis on artist, traveler, and Arabian horse breeder Lady Anne Blunt.

Camilla lives and works in the high-desert landscape of Abiquiú in Northern New Mexico. Her artwork draws upon the landscape surrounding her home as well as her travels throughout the United States and abroad, everyday ranch life, and her enduring relationship with horses. Animals—particularly horses, her first artistic subjects—remain central to her practice and continue to connect her work as an artist with her developing scholarship as an art historian.