Gianina Ferreyra began her pursuit of self-expression at a very young age. Her yearning to be immersed in an artistic environment led her to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts as a visual arts major. There, she immersed herself in figure drawing, painting, video art and photography. Her work garnered several prestigious awards while at LACHSA including two consecutive scholarships from the Kathy Beth Kantor Memorial for photography, top tenth percentile of video and filmmakers in America through the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and winner of the Spotlight Awards, a nationally-acclaimed recognition and scholarship program for young Southern California artists, acknowledging her portrait of Dr. Alfred Benjamin and his wife, both holocaust survivors. The work was exhibited at Bergamot Station and the Dorothy Chandler. After an early graduation from high school, she attended the School of Visual Arts in New York as a photography major with an emphasis in the fine arts. At SVA she exhibited her new work and gained mentors such as Alice Beck-Odette, Gerald Vezzuso, Algis Balsys, and Joyce Culver. Gianina continued to develop and push new ideas of juxtaposing the nude figure in photography and painting to discover its correlation to society. After two years, she decided to further her projects involving nude landscapes by taking advantage of the sceneries of her native California.
Currently, Gianina studies photography at Venice Beach under Julia Dean?s renowned workshops. She works not only with Julia Dean herself but that of exhibiting artists such as Matt Black, Aline Smithson, Duane Michals, Keith Carter and Douglas Kirkland.
Under the influence of artists as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymous Bosch, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Peter Paul Rubens, Wynn Bullock, Otto Dix and Man Ray, Gianina with her enduring passion to merge the worlds of hand forged creation and the depiction of light continues to work and learn as an autodidact with a guiding hand from her friends and loved ones.
