Gianna Ritornaro is a mixed media artist from Freehold, New Jersey, currently based in West Virginia while pursuing her MFA in Painting at West Virginia University. She holds a BA from Brookdale Community College and a BFA from the University of Tampa. Her work explores personal narratives rooted in memory and shaped by diverse lived experiences. Through an intuitive and experimental art-making process, she navigates the tensions between figuration and abstraction to investigate the complexities of the human experience—creation and destruction, comfort and discomfort, belonging and individuality. Striving to balance chaos and calm, her practice reflects the constant flux of life.