Adelina was born in the city of Campos, Rio de Janeiro state. She was a daughter of peasants who went to primary school and learned various manual crafts at a vocational school.

She began to attend the museum’s painting studio in 1946. At first, she dedicated herself to working with clay, sculpting figures that impress us with their likeness to images from the Neolithic period.

In her painting we can see the incredible plant metamorphoses that she experienced, which brought about the famous study by Dr. Nise da Silveira, who compared her work to the Greek myth of Daphne. Adelina also devoted herself to making paper flowers and works with crochet, producing about 17.500 works with an intense expressive force. Her artistic output became the subject of several exhibitions, films, documentaries and publications.