Artist Profile

Gina Pierleoni is a mixed media artist who uses portraiture to spark conversations about empathy and our common humanity. WE ARE THEM, her interactive portrait installation, questions perception, habit and bias around where we place ourselves in relation to others. Portraiture is the opposite of assumption. Pierleoni’s images are acts of deep seeing that push past label and judgments; they "de-separate" us.

The Baltimore Sun described Pierleoni’s mixed media figures as “gloriously human…there's nothing between them and you to keep them from meeting you head-on. It's hard to get too much of an artist who can convey a sense of self-acceptance and strength even in the knowledge of weakness and fallibility.”

Art historian Lillian Maria Burgunder writes, “Pierleoni’s Faces rage with life. Through them the artist probes deeply into the human psyche. The Faces are a visual panoply of the human mind and soul.”

Gina Pierleoni earned her MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland and a BFA in painting from the College of New Rochelle in New York.
She is represented in over 150 private and public collections in the U.S., Canada and Germany.

Exhibitions venues include The Star-Spangled Banner Flag House (in conjunction with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum), Baltimore; Courthouse Galleries, Portsmouth, VA; the Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; Fortezza da Basso, Florence, Italy; WPA/Corcoran, Washington, DC; Betsy Underground Gallery, Miami Beach, FL; Stevenson University, Stevenson, MD; Mooney Gallery, New Rochelle, NY; Maryland Art Place, Baltimore; The Brooklyn Art Library, NY (traveling exhibition) and Maxwell Fine Arts, Peekskill, NY;

Awards include three individual grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, one from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and two nominations to participate in The Florence Biennale. In 2011, she was recognized as a ‘Hero in the MICA Community’. Pierleoni received Recognition of Scholarly and Creative Publications from Harford Community College in Bel Air, MD three times and has served as an Adjunct Professor there since 1996. She was an adjunct from 2007-2013 at TAI Sophia Institute of Transformative Leadership and Social Change (now MUIH) in Laurel, MD.

As an educator and creative consultant, Pierleoni exposes the creative process in order to teach how to trust one’s deepest impulses. Gina has an innate ability to empower her students to dig down within themselves and discover the natural talent each individual possesses. She leads traveling Cultivating Creativity workshops, making the creative process accessible to audiences beyond the art community. Her classes and workshops build connection and strong communities as a model for the larger world.