Ylona “Liwana” Maria is a transdisciplinary artist and practitioner of cultural and somatic work based in Amsterdam. Rooted in Zambales, Pangasinan and Panay. She weaves together storytelling, ritual and ancestral connection engaging with layers of memory, diasporic + archipelagic identity and collective care through a decolonial lens.

Her journey of remembering, returning and re-connecting with both spirit and land started as a child, and became a devotion after enduring illness and a coma in 2020. Through her rehabilitation process, having to learn how to breathe, walk and speak again, she found integral ways of communicating and learning from + with oneself and her lineage through studying traditional practices like hilot, tcm and ayurveda.

Now, as an emerging tattoo practitioner, a student of craniosacral therapy and Indigenous knowledge systems, she devotes herself to learn from and with the body as a vessel of ancestral memory and expression.

Ylona is a co-birther of Balikbayan Collective, a platform for diasporic creative and cultural projects focused on community empowerment and knowledge mobilization. Currently, she is developing ARUGA at the Creative Hub of Heesterveld — a project centering community care and art practices that uplift diasporic communities of the Global Majority.