Paolo Mentasti was born and raised on a plane flying between Sao Paulo, Bogota, and Mexico City.

He earned his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2020 and his MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2023. 

Mentasti’s artwork examines the untimeliness of contemporary life, borrowing archaeology as a method to enter the present and the future. Mentasti works as a forger of a proleptic archaeological record composed of artifacts, traces, and tools produced for future interpretations. Using ceramics and other archaeological mediums, he cites the past and present, invokes the future, and dresses fictions in the cloak of history.