Stories have played a part in Santa-Cristo’s artistic imagination for years, starting back when her grandmother would spin dramatic cautionary tales about what could happen if young Zoraya stuck her hand in the kitchen sink food disposal or swam in water that was too deep. Born in Puerto Rico, Santa-Cristo moved as a young child to Miami, and her parents signed her up for “everything,” including tap dance classes. She attended an arts-centered high school, where she stuck to making “really cheesy” collages from old photographs and tissue paper because she felt she lacked the ability to paint. “Painting scared me,” she says. Then she took a school-sponsored trip to Provence and everything changed. “It opened the door to painting for me,” Santa-Cristo says. “There’s something about the light there that’s just so beautiful. Everyone says that, but it’s true.”

At the Museum School Santa-Cristo started out creating large-scale acrylic portraits. “They were pretty, but in the end they didn’t mean that much to me,” she says. Recently her work has grown more complicated, balancing “on the edge between what’s real and what’s fictitious,” she says. “The planes are funny, the way objects fit into spaces is funny, and the characters are flawed when it comes to proportion and size.” Santa-Cristo inserts symbols into her paintings—voodoo dolls, cigarettes, cats—that sometimes confuse viewers. “I don’t expect people to necessarily understand everything I paint,” she says. “I just want them to relate to it or react to it in some way.”

While Santa-Cristo no longer fears painting, now she worries about what comes afterward: discussing and marketing her work. Gallery owners and art collectors unnerve her. It’s not that Santa-Cristo doesn’t want to hear criticism. “I’d rather listen to people talk about my paintings without them knowing I’m there,” she says. “I’m really a backstage type of person.”