Isabel Alemán Corrales was raised in the city of Santa Clara. After qualifying as a teacher, she taught for more than thirty years until she was forced to retire at the age of fifty-seven because she lost her voice. Encouraged by José Seoane - a Cuban intellectual interested in self-taught creation - she began to draw with her sister, Panchita Alemán, in the 1960s, even though she had never studied painting or trained as an artist. She later joined the Group Pintores y Dibujantes Populares de Las Villas and devoted herself entirely to artistic work until, one day, she decided to stop painting. She returned to creative work some twenty years later.

Alemán Corrales’s graphic work can be seen as a sort of bestiary of creatures, part animal and part vegetable. The inclusion of eyes in her compositions gives these figures a zoomorphic aspect in which plants and animals merge, suggesting a time when the only forms of life were to be found in the depths of the sea. But her motifs do not aim for realism: instead, they remain the expression of her imagination and of the freedom granted to her by her self-taught status.