“Dance comes through abstract language. It's communication outside of language. I felt particularly in tune with how to create a visual palette for that.

I’d been working in video - non-space based, ephemeral, digital. But I wanted to try making things I can touch."

Maya Ciarrocchi is a Canadian American artist who grew up in the famed Westbeth artists’ building in NYC. A child of painters, Maya’s first art form was dance. This form fueled a collaborative ethos which led to work within the ballet, modern dance, and then theater worlds. That work ultimately led to a personal image-making practice.

As a queer artist of Ashkenazi ancestry, Maya’s recent works have coalesced around the thematics of remembrance (Yizkor). These explorations have intersected with activism, forging a unique space and expression to consider displacement and erasure across social and environmental frameworks. Maya’s dynamic picture-making presents an expression of simultaneous tenses - past, present, and future. With her ambitious cyanotypes  and other media she aspires to make the erased past visible, while also articulating a dynamic, embodied future.