Zilia Sánchez Domínguez (12 July 1926 – 18 December 2024) was a Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-based abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator.

She started her career as a set designer for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban Revolution, eventually moving to New York to work as an abstract painter.

Sánchez Domínguez blurred the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes.

[4] As a child she was neighbors with the well-known artist Víctor Manuel García Valdés, who - along with her father, an amateur painter - first began her interest in art.

[2] Her early paintings were primarily done in an abstract expressionist or Art Informel-inspired style with loose, messy brushstrokes and dark tones.

[5][2] In addition to painting, she worked extensively as a set designer in Havana,[8][5] primarily for the experimental theater group Las Máscaras.

[11][6][10] In October 1959, following Fidel Castro's rise to power the same year, Sánchez Domínguez was included in the first post-Revolution edition of the country's annual salon exhibition of painting; party leaders and local critics faulted the exhibition for including such a large amount of abstract art, which they deemed incapable of supporting revolutionary politics.

[11] She said she left Cuba due to her concerns that her abstract style of art-making would not be well-received in a political environment that favored propagandistic art, as well as her fears as a lesbian of possible state repression.

[2] These paintings were much lighter in color than her previous works, using muted grays, whites, and blues to create smooth surfaces with little to no visible brushwork, visually similar to many minimalist artworks from the era.

[10][15] In 2000, she executed the performance piece Encuentrismo — Ofrenda o Retorno (The Encounter — Offering or Return) using one of her shaped canvases, a painting titled Soy Isla.

[4][15] Writing in The New York Times, critic Holland Cotter called the show "one of the year's high points, a revelation and a refreshment.

[17] With the support of several of her students and a number of community members, Sánchez Domínguez rebuilt and repaired her damaged studio, moving back into the space by 2019.

[28][29] In 2023, her work was included in the group exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.