Celeste Woss y Gil was the first female, professional artist of the Dominican Republic. The daughter of a former president, Woss y Gil was forced into exile with her family at a young age and lived for nine years in Paris. She received her first artistic training under the tutelage of the Dominican painter Abelardo Rodriguez Urdaneta and, from there on, continued her studies in Cuba and later New York City. When she returned to her hometown of Santo Domingo in 1924, she launched a solo exhibition, which would be a first for a female artist in the Dominican Republic. Her style may have been heavily influenced the impressionistic movement of the European continent, but her gaze preferred the sights of the Caribbean. She painted nudes of Dominican women and everyday scenes of markets, architecture, and landscapes. Perhaps more impressive than her trailblazing art career was her devotion to advancing the state of art in the Dominican Republic through a robust education program. In 1931, she opened a small art academy and in 1942, helped to create the National School of Fine Arts, where she later instructed Clara Ledesma and Rosa Tavarez. Woss y Gil also played an important role in the woman's suffrage movement in the Dominican Republic that won women the right to vote during the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship. In 1927, she along with Abigaíl Mejía, Delia Weber, Trina de Moya, Ana Josefa Puello, and other artists and educators founded Nosotras Club, the first feminist organization in the country, which advocated for woman's liberation and the betterment of children. Years later, in 1931, Acción Feminista Dominicana (AFD) was established, with the purpose of the “intellectual, social, moral, and juridical development of women”. The organization pursued Dominican women's right to vote, and launched a feminist manifesto in 1931, claiming the right to gender equality in the country's Constitution. Women were officially granted the right to vote in 1942. In 1939, Woss and Gil's "El Vendedor de Andullos" was exhibited in the World Painting Exhibition at the New York World's Fair, obtaining a Medal of Honor for her painting; this painting depicts two men smoking andullo, a form of dried, compressed, fermented, and rolled tobacco for pipe smoking and chewing widely used in Dominican Republic since pre-Columbian times. The background of the image displays working people going about their everyday lives, as well as children playing beneath a Arecaceae palm tree and a blue sky. The painting travelled around the United States well into the 1940s.

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