Carolina Mascarenhas was born in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
She graduated in Traditional Animation from the University of Westminster in London after completing a one-year foundation degree in Art & Design at the University of the Creative Arts. After spending five years in London and a period in New York, where she attended the Art Students League, she now lives and works in Lisbon.
Her early career was marked by large-scale installations made with paper clay and influenced by the vibrant and raw energy of Brazil.
During the pandemic in Lisbon, space limitations (and perhaps the chaos of the moment) led her to seek a more contained, refined approach to making art. She returned to porcelain painting, a practice she cherished learning as a child, which gradually evolved into painting tiles, possibly influenced by Portugal’s rich ceramic tradition.
From tiles, her practice expanded into sculpting, allowing her to reimagine some of her previously large-scale works in smaller, more intimate forms. This progression naturally led to her ceramic backgammon project, inspired by another childhood memory of an old tile mosaic backgammon board in her home. Today, this project remains her primary focus through Studio Masca, alongside ceramic sculptures and the occasional observational painting.