Lita Albuquerque (b. 1946, Santa Monica, California) earned a BFA in art history from UCLA in 1968 and studied sculpture at the Otis College of Art and Design from 1971 to 1972. Emerging in the 1970s as a pioneer of the Light and Space and Land Art movements in Southern California, she has spent five decades making site-specific installations, paintings, and sculpture that explore color, light, and cosmology — often using pigment and gold leaf alongside astronomical imagery. Her project Stellar Axis: Antarctica (2006) placed ninety-nine ultramarine-blue spheres across Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf, each aligned with the position of a star in the Antarctic sky, in an expedition supported by a National Science Foundation grant. She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale (1996), where her work Sol Star won the Biennale’s top prize. She served for thirty-five years as core faculty in the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where she is now Emeritus Faculty. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).