Bio

Christina DiStefano is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist working in painting, performance, video, digital art, and installation. Through an intense physicality of creation, DiStefano paints over the canvas on the floor, utilizing the body as a vessel to transcend through movement and energy, ultimately manifesting itself into a physical, visual language. This is the primary basis of creation for her work, in which she then re-purposes her large-scale paintings into video and digital collages. Themes of wisdom passed through lineage, past lives, parallel universes, and questioning personal identity influence her work.

DiStefano received a BA Degree with a concentration in Studio Art from the University of Missouri - Kansas City in 2005. Shortly after she arrived in New York City, she founded Anti-Oxidant BK, a monthly video art salon in Bushwick, Brooklyn, from 2007 through 2009. Additionally, DiStefano is a certified Yoga Alliance Instructor & Reiki Master, which strongly influences the movement of her body in creating her work and the ritualistic connection to her ancestors when creating.

Statement

My work is about resilience and using one’s imagination to heal, survive, and ultimately thrive. I utilize perceived limitations to fuel creation, taking up space and alchemizing the room's energy from disempowerment to empowerment. I find inspiration in overcoming the childhood adversity that shaped my behavior and paradigms reflected in my life today.

Before I could understand my emotions, creating art was a means of escaping reality and shaping my own ethereal world. Growing up in the suburban Midwest as a biracial child of European and Mexican indigenous descent, I was often bullied for my “ethnically ambiguous” appearance. Being an empathetic person, I was hyper-attuned to the energy of others and often felt the heaviness of judgment from the world around me. Through this, my young mind rejected my body and escaped to a dream-state world. Drawing and painting were how I accessed this alternate dimension.

By incorporating energy work and Eastern philosophy, I discovered art as a meditation ritual, reaching a state of an almost trance-like movement in creating my paintings. I explore the body as a communication vehicle channeling generational guidance from my ancestors and intuition. At times I work with clusters of paintings, each with a quiet intensity, representing the many lifetimes I’ve lived and the varied incarnations of the same soul.

The paintings are layered with numerous cathartic motions. Pouring paint, smoothing, scraping, and folding the canvas creates a ghost-like gesture as if the spirit is coming through the work. The purification repeatedly continues until a feeling of peace overcomes my body, and all feels complete.

What began as a journey of survival has evolved into creating an identity through a visual expression that transcends race, gender, and box to check on the national census.

Curriculum Vitae

Exhibitions

2008 It’s Not Easy, Group Exhibition, Exit Art, New York, NY

2008 At Home, A Gathering of the Tribes, New York, NY

2008 Bushwick Open Studios, Group Exhibition at the Jefferson Street Studios, Brooklyn, NY

2023 Beneath it All, Online Group Exhibition, Visionary Art Collective, curated by Marina Granger, The Artist Advisory

Curatorial

2012 Anti-Oxidant: Promantic Group Show, Curated by Christina Medina and Jason La Blond, Christopher Henry Gallery, New York, NY

2008 Anti-Oxidant + Bushwick Open Studios, Brooklyn, NY

2007-2008 Anti-Oxidant BK, On going curatorial residency at The Northeast Kingdom Performance Space, Brooklyn, NY