CLENG sumagaysay

Artist Bio

CLENG SUMAGAYSAY aka Cathlyn Sumagaysay-del Rosario was born and raised in the Philippines. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Arts from the oldest university in Asia, University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, PH in 2001. She taught Mass Communications at Palawan State University for a year before migrating to the United States in 2002. She attended the Los Angeles City College in 2005 to study art and transferred to California State University, Long Beach in 2008 to major in BA Studio Art. From 2007 to present, she has been exhibiting in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Philippines. Her self-portrait painting, “At the Forefront of an Archaic Yet Seemingly New Paradigm” (2011), became the cover of the book, “KOMENTULARYOS”,  by an award-winning Filipino poet and writer, Tomas F. Agulto.

Cleng is the co-founder of Art on the Move, an art collective in Palawan, PH. Art on the Move has been exhibiting all over the country, and it represented Palawan in Berlin, Germany in 2017. She was chosen as one of the 10 Most Outstanding Palaweno Artists for the first ever “My City, My Sm, My Art” juried by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and also became one of the Top 10 Philippine Contemporary Artists from the Regions (Palawan). Cleng's mural painting (a collaboration with Carmela Cucueco) at Wild Feather in Lower Haight, San Francisco was used as a fundraiser for the launching of the historic Paint the Void project in 2020. Her self-portrait mural was featured on Fox News and in other news articles. 

Cleng often paints self-portraits, emphasizing introspection in her work.