Yanin Ruibal is a visual artist and illustrator born in Tijuana in 1989 and raised in Hermosillo, Sonora, México. In 2008, she moved to Puebla to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. After two years, she left the program and spent a year in Los Angeles taking courses at OTIS College of Art and Design.

In 2012, Yanin relocated to Mexico City, where she worked in creative agencies before transitioning to a full-time freelance career. By 2014, she was supporting herself through illustration and painting. Since then, Yanin has participated in exhibitions across Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Austin, Buenos Aires, among other cities.

In 2020, Saatchi Art named her one of their “35 Under 35 Rising Stars.” She has also collaborated on two successful NFT projects with Saatchi Art and has worked with a variety of Mexican and international brands.

In March 2025, she returned to Sonora to presented a critically and commercially successful solo show in her hometown of Hermosillo. She is currently residing in Sonora developing a project in collaboration with local artisans, exploring the intersection of personal narrative, material tradition, and regional identity.

Ruibal's work is deeply informed by the landscapes, symbols, and emotional terrain of the Sonoran Desert, where memory, identity, and lived experience are translated into dreamlike, symbolic imagery.

Working within a contemporary neosurrealist language, Ruibal explores existence as a space of duality: where the sublime and the chaotic, vulnerability and resilience, coexist. Her practice is rooted in personal experience and cultural heritage, addressing themes of femininity, neurodivergence, human nature, and transformation. Humans, animals, and desert elements appear as metaphors for inner conflict, emotional tension, and the ongoing process of reconciling one’s origins with growth and change.

Spanning painting, drawing, and mixed media, her work uses Sonoran flora and fauna as narrative tools of her own personal visual language. Rather than offering literal storytelling, Ruibal creates emotional landscapes that invite introspection and personal interpretation, allowing viewers to move between shared fiction and fragmented reality.

At its core, her practice reflects a collective yet intimate search for meaning—where difference, isolation, and difficulty become sources of beauty and strength, echoing the quiet power of the desert itself.

Bachelor of Visual Arts, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, 2008-2010. Bachelor of Visual Arts (Transferred), Universidad de Sonora, 2010-2011 (Incomplete).

Taller Abierto, collaboration by Casa Hotbook, Hilario Galguera Gallery and El Cuarto de Máquinas, CDMX, 2025

Art Fest, online NFT show by World of Women and Saatchi Art, February 2023.

Todos Ponen Feria, show by artists from the northwest of México. Culiacán, Sinaloa, November 2022. 

The Other Art Fair, Global Edition, March 2021.

Spring Forward Art Exhibition, Revelation Gallery, New York, NY, March 2021.