Demitrius Omphroy

Youth and Sporting CP

By 15 Omphroy was training with United States under-17 squads and had faced the academy sides of Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United in youth tournaments. He was recruited by José Costa, a former Portugal international then scouting in Santa Clara, California with a brief to bring American players aged 14 to 16 to Portugal, and travelled to Sporting CP for a two-week trial with the club's under-16 side at its academy in Alcochete. Within a week the junior coach had called him up to the under-17 team, and Sporting proposed that he stay: the club would enrol him in school and provide a food stipend, and he would train and scrimmage with senior players, but he would play no competitive football until he turned 18, at which point his future would be decided. Living well outside Lisbon with no Portuguese, Omphroy struggled at first; the arrangement improved once two South African academy players and their family began hosting him at weekends. Sporting told Costa it intended to sign him. Shortly afterwards Omphroy woke with blurred vision that did not clear in training. The club sent him to a doctor and within a week he had flown to California to see specialists. He never returned to Portugal.

College and amateur

Omphroy enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he played four seasons of college soccer and studied art. During his college years he also appeared for the San Francisco Seals of the USL Premier Development…

Creative direction

Omphroy returned to Berkeley to complete his art studies and joined the camera manufacturer GoPro, where he became an associate creative director and produced soccer films. He later moved to New York and worked as a creative director for Adidas and Major League Soccer. He was laid off by the league during the COVID-19 pandemic and used the severance period to paint full-time.

Painting

Until then Omphroy had painted only intermittently, including a small series made while he was at Toronto FC. Back in the San Francisco Bay Area he began leaving finished canvases in public places and announcing their locations on Instagram; the response, he has said, gave him the confidence to pursue art seriously. Working full-time from 2020, he built a commercial practice quickly, with apparel collaborations including FCUK and Gap, group shows between New York and Mexico City, exhibitions during Art Basel week in Miami, and murals in Los Angeles and New Jersey. He held residencies at the Mexico City gallery JO-HS in late 2021 and again in January 2023. In July 2022 the art-market platform Artnet presented a ten-painting selling exhibition of his work built around what he described as the phases of love, "the full spectrum" of which, he said, "cannot exist without pain." He staged his first solo exhibition, Homecoming, in San Francisco in 2025, following an artist residency in New York.

Style and influences

Omphroy works in a contemporary…

Omphroy was born on May 30, 1989, and raised in Alameda, California. His father, Ric, a photographer, is the son of a Panamanian father and a German mother; his mother, Beverly, is a second-generation Filipina American. Both of his eventual careers began at home. He painted with his mother at the kitchen table before he was old enough to play football, the results pinned to the refrigerator. He took up the game at four after hearing his older brother and father kicking a ball against the outside wall of the house, and was playing on a team within a year. His father coached him and, by Omphroy's account, gave him no special treatment.

Omphroy's parents were born in the United States. His father is of Panamanian and German descent and his mother of Filipino descent. He has multiple sclerosis. The first symptom was optic neuritis while he was at Sporting CP; numbness in his foot and neck pain followed, and an MRI scan in February 2010 confirmed the diagnosis. The condition prevented him from signing his first professional contract with Sporting and forced his return to the United States for treatment. Toronto FC were unaware of it when they drafted him. His treatment includes daily self-administered injections of Copaxone. Omphroy appeared in the music video for "Boyfriend" by Justin Bieber.