Dinorá Justice is a School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston graduate from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil who currently resides in Massachusetts.

The “Odalisque” paintings are Justice's current body of work. They address conscious and unconscious biases regarding traditional associations of nature with the feminine. The philosophers of the Enlightenment equated men with reason, whereas women and nature were consigned to the realm of the irrational. This idea lives on in the widely used expression “Mother Nature,” which feminizes the environment and gives credence, by way of tradition, to the attitude that both nature and women need to be conquered, domesticated and controlled. Justice's idea is to step back and look at women differently and to weigh the impact of deeply ingrained attitudes toward the female that have ramifications in the realm of ecology. For this, she chose to work with iconic paintings of women by masters such as Matisse and Ingres, from a period in their careers in which they explored a fascination with the exotic Middle East through paintings of “odalisques,” quasi-slave women kept secluded in the harems of upper-class men. In these paintings, she substituted trees and plants for drapery and furniture, and she used traditional marbling techniques to erase specificity through patterns. This work tries to show how feminist issues can potentially strengthen environmentalism because a more egalitarian and just society plays naturally into the understanding that we are part of a vast living organism that seeks equilibrium.