Helena Colaço Salazar

From an early age, she revealed a strong interest in the arts, enjoying drawing, photography, dance and other sports. At the age of thirteen she lost her father, an event that spontaneously led her to write poetry and draw, later choosing the arts field in high school.
She began her career in theatre, where she worked as an actress for eleven years.
In 2005 she returned to drawing through the development of the character Kelly, from Wayne Jordan’s play The Drowned World. From this experience came the public exhibition The Imaginary World of Kelly. Later, in 2010, she presented her first solo painting exhibition, Appearances, also inspired by a theatre play with the same name, staged at Sociedade de Instrução Guilherme Cossoul.
Her desire to explore new forms of expression beyond acting led her to study New Painting Techniques at the National Society of Fine Arts, as well as Photography at the Portuguese Institute of Photography.
She completed internships as a photojournalist at the newspapers Público and i, and also photographed theatre plays, concerts, vernissages, architecture and developed authorial photography projects.
In 2014 she moved to Tróia, where she lived for three years working on the concept of Identity, which later took her on a nomadic path between 2017 and 2023. That year she returned to Tróia and began preparing her next solo painting exhibition, From My Mother Paintings, presented at Fábrica do Braço de Prata, in Lisbon, in 2025. Over these years she also participated in several collective exhibitions of photography and painting.
Today she divides her time between Lisbon and the south of Portugal, continuously expanding her creative practice as a visual artist.