Art is imagination. Art is freedom. Art is healing. Art can also be a longterm investment.
I like to say my artistic life began before I could even walk. In the Christening rituals of my home country, Romania, a child is offered objects that might reveal their future—I reached for a colored pencil. My mother always believed that moment explained why I covered the doors and walls of our house in color long before I could fully stand.
I grew up wanting to attend art school, but my parents enrolled me in a top math and physics high school. Still, I painted. I was fascinated with oil paint—it felt unpredictable, alive, and liberating. I wanted to understand form and color. As a compromise, instead of studying art, I earned a degree in Textile Design and Engineering from the “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iași, moved to Bucharest, and even started a PhD.
After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, a new world opened. I enrolled at the University of Arts in my hometown, Iași, to study painting while working full-time, creating fashion, teaching geometry and technical drawing, hosting an art radio show, practicing journalism. I even opened a small gym for women. It was chaotic, exhilarating, and full of possibility.
But my desire to dedicate myself fully to art led me to Vancouver, Canada, where I completed my Master of Fine Arts in Theatre at the University of British Columbia. My graduate counselor encouraged me toward it instead of pursuing painting, and he was right. I fell in love with creating meaning out of entire worlds of light, space, sound, costumes, and movement.
In 1999, one of my stage designs was selected for the Prague Quadrennial’s first student pavilion. That trip was a defining moment—it gave me permission to expand my work beyond theatre and theatre design into the realms of visual art and scenography.
I enrolled in the Master of Arts in Scenography program at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, with training in physical performance at Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) in the Netherlands, and in video, photography, and public art at the School of Art and Design Zurich (HGKZ) in Switzerland. For the first time, my work didn’t need justification. I could experiment freely, and the audience responded. My thesis performance installation, Inertia, was presented to a packed, overflowing house.
By then my work had developed its own distinct vocabulary, so I decided to name it ScenoArt—a term that loosely translates to “writing in space.” It extends the principles of scenography into the creation of hybrid works across theatre, performance, installation, video, and painting. Under this signature, my projects found both a home and a language of their own.
While my artistic life flourished, my personal life unraveled. The loss of my father, heartbreak, illness, and a series of planned and unplanned moves—first in Honolulu, then in Toronto—pulled me into a spiral. Bogged Down, a performance installation, and Bumpy Road, a video work, emerged from this period: raw, urgent works shown at the Salvador Allende Festival for Peace in Toronto.
When I moved to Buffalo, NY, my new home became my refuge, and my art, the only place where I could unveil my truth. Over time, I collapsed into survival mode, pouring all my energy into perfecting myself in my now 20+ year career in IT. Art became harder and harder to access. One morning, I woke up deeply unhappy—a stark realization that I had abandoned myself and my dreams.
As a lifelong learner, I had always turned to books—philosophy, psychology, spirituality. Eventually, in 2023, I enrolled in a Master of Science in Psychology of Mental Health and Wellbeing, which I completed in October 2025. That decision became a turning point. It gave me not only the tools to heal, but the courage to return to an old project, Rhinoceros, which by serendipity evolved into Rhinoceritis—more personal, more honest performance.
Since 2007, much of my work has been incubated and shared through ScenoArt, my studio and gallery in Buffalo, NY. Earlier in my career, my works traveled widely across Europe and Canada, with presentations at Veem Theatre in Amsterdam, Maumaunderground in Barcelona, Museum-Kunst-Palast in Düsseldorf, and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, among many others.
A new chapter of my artistic life is unfolding now: resurrecting The Eternal Return, a long-overdue book about circling back to painting through my performance work—my own interpretation of the concept explored by Nietzsche and Eliade. Veiling and unveiling again.
