About

Bio
Cherisse Alcantara is a Filipina-American painter whose luminous, deeply observed oil paintings transform everyday encounters and fleeting perceptions into quiet meditations on home, impermanence, the unknown, and the search for rootedness and belonging. Through imagery of nature, shifting light, horizons, and built environments, her work explores moments of transition and the act of contemplation where searching unfolds. Alcantara builds layered surfaces of paint with attention to both color and atmosphere, distilling experience and emotion into sustained attention, inviting viewers to reflect on time, change, and vastness.

Cherisse received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2021) and BA from the University of California-Berkeley (2013). She is the recipient of the Wendy Sussman Prize in Painting (UC Berkeley) and the Dessner Memorial Travel Award (PAFA).

Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Pence Gallery, Sanchez Art Center, and Berkeley Art Center. Alcantara’s work is in the collection of the San Francisco Arts Commission. She has held residencies at Jentel (WY) and Chalk Hill (CA).

She was born in the Philippines and raised both there and in the United States. An arts educator, Alcantara lives and works in San Francisco, CA.