Alberto Baraya (Bogotá, 1968) is a visual artist and researcher. Through his projects and artworks, he focuses on defending artistic practice as a legitimate form of knowledge, on using scientific methodologies as a tool for artistic research, and on the expedition as his most effective format. Over the years he has developed the persona of the Artificial Naturalist, a persistent and ironic explorer seeking to reconstruct the lost identity of the relationship between humankind and nature. Since 2001 he has styled himself as a "traveler," in clear reference to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European expeditionaries who carried out botanical explorations in the name of science but in practice served colonial interests. His concerns have found specific expression in the Herbarium of Artificial Plants, begun in 2002, an artistic project that has given rise to a range of works forming an extensive archive of collected specimens, photographs, drawings, and accounts of a false biology. The project brings together hundreds of formal taxonomies of artificial specimens gathered through urban and rural expeditions around the world — from the Amazon jungle to New Zealand, Venice, and Colombia — following standard scientific methodologies of observation and classification. 

He is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he began his professional practice in 1992. He went on to complete a Master's degree in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a specialization in Multimedia at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, pursued with the support of the Reina Sofía scholarship awarded by the Embassy of Spain. Early in his career he received distinctions including second honorable mention (1992) and third prize (1994) at the Alliance Française's Bienal de Joven Fotografía, and has also taught in the arts, including at the Universidad de los Andes.