Magali Herrera (1914–1992) was born in Rivera, Uruguay. She came from a family of notables and taught herself dancing, acting, and photography; she also organised poetry evenings. She wrote poems herself, as well as science fiction stories, which have not been published. She was a keen reader, with wide interests and a particular liking for esotericism, especially oriental philosophies such as Tantric traditions and Taoism. She worked as a journalist as well, hosting conferences and writing for various newspapers. In the early 1950s, she started to paint from time to time, and then devoted herself exclusively to this means of expression, painting night and day in a sort of trance.
She used black, white, or coloured ink on white, black, or coloured paper. Her technique is original and sophisticated, close to Pointillism, and her compositions result from a spontaneous process of continuous production. Like her stories, her paintings represent utopias. Although she was never really involved in spiritism, her drawings emerge from a faculty for possession that makes them comparable to mediumistic art. She took her own life at the age of seventy-eight.