Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter

Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and artist whose work unfolds at the confluence of language, literature, philosophy, and religion. She is currently completing her B.A. in Romance Languages & Literatures—concentrating in Spanish and French—with a minor in Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Originally from southeastern Massachusetts, she has also lived in Miami, New Jersey, Oregon, and Paris. She is presently based in Santiago, Chile, where she is spending a semester abroad at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, studying in both the Facultad de Letras and the Facultad de Teología.

Her academic work orbits the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of language and narrative. In addition to her native English, she speaks Spanish and French with advanced proficiency, and has recently begun learning Quechua and Nahuatl. She is especially drawn to the religious and philosophical traditions of Mesoamerica, compelled by the cosmological, ontological, and metaphysical worlds encoded within language itself.

This preoccupation with language and its enigmas extends naturally into her creative work. As a fiction writer, Ava Linda probes the porous threshold between the real and the fantastic. Her narratives, haunted by the specters of magical realism, the gothic, and the surreal, move through shifting terrains where dream converges with waking, allegory with speculation, and the earthly with the transcendent. She draws inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinthine metaphysics, Isabel Allende’s mystic heroines, Leonora Carrington’s occult dreamscapes, and Remedios Varo’s ever-alchemizing imagination. Within this liminal domain, her fiction orbits her most enduring philosophical fixations: the psychoanalytic tension between Eros and Thanatos; Georges Bataille’s meditations on eroticism, death, and continuity; the Jungian collective unconscious; and the esoteric inheritances of mysticism, theology, and alchemy.

In the visual arts, Ava Linda works primarily with ink, gouache, and oil, creating surreal, symbol-laden landscapes inhabited by hybrid feminine figures—sphinxes, dolls, wraithlike presences—suspended between sorrow and liberation. Her imagery lingers on the disentangling of dualities: light and dark, beauty and shadow, loss and longing. By weaving together myth, memory, desire, and disquiet, she seeks to summon those intimate spaces and luminous realms where lived experience grazes the unconscious, and the visible world begins to dream.

Music is likewise one of the central currents in her life. Shaped by melancholic and atmospheric genres—ethereal wave, psychedelic folk, black metal, neoclassical darkwave, doom, dream pop, and beyond—she has long loved the piano and, in recent years, has begun experimenting with synthesizers, composition, and songwriting. She aspires to fuse her classical foundation with the dark, synth-driven textures she has always cherished, gradually cultivating a sound that is wholly her own.

Outside the studio and the classroom, Ava Linda continues to find enduring solace in the natural world. Hiking, backpacking, stargazing, and wandering forested trails are integral to her life. From Alaska to Argentina, her imagination draws nourishment from the wild terrains of the Americas—woodlands, deserts, jungles, and mountain ranges alike. Yet of all these landscapes, it is the moss-draped forests and the delicate, dew-lit fog of the Pacific Northwest that she feels most inwardly bound to, and that she calls her soul’s true home.

Equally central to Ava Linda’s vocation is her devotion to teaching and to the cultivation of literacy and multilingualism. Over the past several years, she has worked as a tutor, mentor, and teaching assistant, and she looks ahead to continuing this work abroad through international fellowships or assistantships, particularly in Latin America, before pursuing graduate studies in Religious or Mesoamerican Studies and, ultimately, a doctorate in Comparative Literature.

This website serves as a living home for her literary, scholarly, and artistic practice—a space where fiction, essays, research, and visual art converge, and where she shares the questions, inspirations, and evolving constellations of thought that continue to shape her world.