“Painting the figure is a conversation between three forces — the subject, the paint, and the unseen presence in the room.”

I've known I was an artist since I was a child. I grew up in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village as the daughter of immigrants, shaped by a family history of strength, survival, and reinvention. Drawing became my refuge early on — a language I understood instinctively and a way to make sense of the world around me. Art was where I belonged. That relationship has never left me.

At eleven, I began studying live figure drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I later returned to earn my MFA there, after receiving a BA in Visual Communications from the Colorado Institute of Art. My career has moved between fine art and visual design, and both continue to shape the way I work. Design taught me structure, composition, and how to guide the eye. Painting taught me when to let go of control and follow instinct.

I work primarily in oil on linen and wood, building tactile surfaces through layers of color, movement, and texture. The physicality of paint matters to me — the drag of a brush, the edge left by a palette knife, the places where something is obscured and then revealed. I want the surface to carry evidence of its making and to feel as alive and complicated as the subject itself.

My paintings explore autonomy, resilience, and power through the figure. I don't paint portraits in the traditional sense. The figures become archetypes — carrying states of vulnerability, defiance, desire, introspection, and self-possession. I’m interested in the contradictions we carry: strength and softness, presence and absence.

Beauty is not the point. It’s the way in. I think of a flower pushing through concrete — beautiful, stubborn, wild, and alive — despite everything working against it. That tension — what survives, what refuses to disappear, and what continues to grow — is something I return to again and again.

I paint from an unapologetic female perspective, grounded in emotional territory that is ultimately human — inviting the viewer to recognize something of themselves in the work. As a woman and creative professional who has spent years navigating spaces not always built for people like me, I paint what I know: feminine power is not performance. It is elemental. My work is a celebration of that.

My work has been exhibited nationally and featured by NBC News, the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and Google Intersection. It is held in private, public, and corporate collections in the United States and internationally. I am based in the San Francisco Bay Area and take on a limited number of site-specific and commissioned projects each year.