Considered as the pioneer and the greatest contemporary Bolivian artists, María Luisa Mariaca Dietrich de Pacheco was born in 1919 in La Paz. Daughter of an architect, she discovers Art thanks to her father and perfects herself in the Academia de Bellas Artes Hernando Siles in her home town. In 1948, she gets in the newspaper La Razón as an illustrator and publisher for the literary section. She leaves the national daily paper in 1951, and profiting from a government grant she carries on her studies in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando de Madrid taking classes from the Spanish Cubic painter Daniel Vazquez Diaz. Back in La Paz in 1952, she goes back to the Academia de Bellas Artes Hernando Siles as a teacher. After working on the Bolivian aboriginal figurative style, representing Altiplano landscapes and native peoples, she adopts an abstract style, under the influence of d'Antoni Tápies and founds an avant-garde group called “Eight contemporary artists” or “Class 52”.