BIO
Anna Feldman is a Bay Area visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice centers on the figure, the face, and the ways identity is shaped by social roles, repetition, and the limits of knowing another person.
Feldman was born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her early experience as a figure skater and performer in a children’s ice theater shaped her understanding of the body as both disciplined and expressive. The architecture of Saint Petersburg and frequent visits to the Hermitage formed her visual lens, giving her an early sensitivity to gesture, theatricality, history, and the emotional charge of the human figure.
She studied applied mathematics and worked in the tech industry before returning to art more fully in California. In the Bay Area, she studied art and art history while developing an independent studio practice.
Her work has been exhibited in the Bay Area, including at The Drawing Room SF, Berkeley Art Center, Pacific Art League, and SFWA Gallery, and has been featured in Fiber Art Now. In 2025, she curated Symbiotic Drift, an international online exhibition focused on ecology, unstable relations, and the contemporary image.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The figure remains central to my work because it is where the forces shaping a person become visible. I return to the face and body as sites where social roles, obligation, and performance leave traces.
I am drawn to what happens when a person continues to function while becoming less fully present to themselves. The work comes from that quiet dislocation: the gap between outward composure and inner strain.
It also comes from the difficulty of truly knowing another person. However near we come to someone, part of them remains beyond our grasp. With time, even what once felt vivid can harden, fade, or become only partially knowable.
Contemporary life often asks people to appear coherent, productive, available, and emotionally managed. My work gives form to what becomes strained under those demands: presence, intimacy, and the recognition of another person as fully real.
CV available here.
