Christina DiStefano is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on painting and photography. Through abstracted landscapes, she explores the relationship between the natural world and the worlds we carry within us: dreams, memories, imagined places, and the meanings we give to what we see.

Growing up as a biracial child in the suburban Midwest, DiStefano experienced bullying and an acute awareness of how others perceived her. Feeling untethered to a single cultural identity, she found refuge in drawing, painting, and imaginative play. Art offered a space in which her sense of self could extend beyond the identities others assigned to her.

Nature was equally formative. As a child, she searched creek beds for fossils and traces of earlier worlds. These encounters opened onto a history far older than humanity, while the places she explored became secret worlds in her imagination. That impulse to search, discover, and imagine continues to shape her practice.

Her paintings evoke landscapes of dreams and inner experience. Gestural lines, layered surfaces, and forms that hover at the edge of recognition invite associations with growth, erosion, concealment, and emergence. Light and darkness carry both visual and emotional tension: a shadow might suggest shelter, mystery, or unease. She is interested in how these associations arise, and how a painted space can feel at once unfamiliar and intimately known.

Her visual sensibility draws on surrealist photography, particularly the work of Man Ray and Lee Miller, experiments with photograms, and the restraint of minimalism. Her interests in Eastern philosophy and spirituality inform an attention to intuition, impermanence, and the relationship between inner experience and the living world.

DiStefano approaches art-making as a form of exploration and excavation, following traces whose meaning may emerge through the process. Her work asks where we find belonging and how we recognize ourselves within nature. Underlying this inquiry is an awareness that we are part of the organic, biological world we observe, sharing in its vulnerability and continual transformation.