Baker Artist Portfolios

Katya Villano is a queer and trans painter whose work focuses on the relationship between longing, shame and desire.  They work from stages that house 3D figures and paintings of earlier stage arrangements of the same figures, giving new paintings multiple iterations of a body or form, allowing its reality to remain multi-faceted. Their approach is a trans practice where role is shaped by relationship, the body is ever-changing, and depiction is limited to tangential representations.  Their work rejects the myth of purity and insists on complicated and contradictory truths. Villano was a 2017 Sondheim semi-finalist (Baltimore, MD) and a 2017 finalist for the visual arts fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA). They were a resident at Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) in July 2016, and they exhibited their thesis at Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD) where they are a 2016 graduate.