Leah Mata Fragua is a California Indian artist and educator whose work moves across sculpture, handmade paper, stone, shell, sound, and place-based materials. She is yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash, and her practice is grounded in material knowledge, women’s labor, environmental change, and the cultural responsibilities carried through land-based making.

Her work often begins with materials gathered, formed, or transformed by hand. After the collapse of abalone access along the California coast, Mata Fragua turned toward handmade paper as a sculptural medium, using plant fibers, natural pigments, and ephemeral processes to hold questions of memory, land, loss, and continuity. Alongside this work, she continues to engage stone, shell, and other enduring materials, allowing her practice to move between the temporary and the permanent.

Mata Fragua’s work has been collected or exhibited by the Denver Art Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Hood Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Tia Collection, and other institutions. She has participated in programs and residencies with the School for Advanced Research, First Peoples Fund, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

In addition to her studio practice, Mata Fragua teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she works with emerging Native artists across material practice, cultural knowledge, and contemporary art discourse. Her work centers California Indian presence, kincentric relationships to place, and the ongoing labor of carrying culture through material form.