She completed her primary and secondary schooling at Colegio Marymount in Bogotá, taking private lessons in painting under Luciano Jaramillo.

[1] In 1967, she married Jacques Mosseri, an architect, and they spent a month in New York City, exploring exhibits of Pop Art, before returning home to Bogotá.

[1] The window was a device to focus the view on a frozen moment in time, typically depicting a landscape image, with the frame itself representing the separation of the internal and external reality.

[4][7][Notes 1] By the mid-1970s Hoyos' series Atmósferas (Atmospheres) breaks through the window and the images explore the unfettered expanse of light, abandoning the frame entirely.

[12] In 1978, Hoyos won the 27th National Salon of Visual Artists first place prize for her Atmósferas works, which was controversial[7][8] because of the highly competitive nature of the Colombian art scene and ultimately led her to make New York City her second home.

[16] Between 1984 and 1987, these still lifes became an exploration of art history, paying homage to master painters of the past, such as Caravaggio, Cézanne, Jawlensky, Lichtenstein, Van Gogh, Zurbarán.

[17] Reworking some of their paintings, Hoyos' study of history inserted her own view of magical or mythical and ethnic experience into the European tradition.

[20] She began documenting through photographs and oral interviews the history of San Basilio de Palenque, collecting testimonials of common people, their herbal knowledge, legends, games and cultural traditions.

[19] The paintings used exaggerated light and details infused with tropical images and colors to depict the Caribbean coastal populations and vegetation.

The variety of styles, including abstract, Pop Art, and realism presented, in a chronological display, the development of the artist and her explosive use of color and rhythm.

[22] Her contemporary style, reflected both art movements in her era, as well as her pictorial commentary on the history of Latin America through her images of the multicultural traditions of mestizos and Afro-Latinos.