about

Diana Blain Fine is a visual artist from The Gambia whose works across photography and collage represent her engagement with societal norms around beauty and power in Africa and the West. Born in the tiny nation of The Gambia into a politically engaged Catholic, Jewish and Muslim family involved in the Pan-African and Gambian independence movements, Diana was raised across continents. She has lived in the U.K., Pakistan, Liberia, New York and Indonesia and has traveled extensively around the globe. Her personal experiences living under a military dictatorship in South Asia, as a young teen witnessing the dawn of a bloody coup in Liberia, and as an immigrant in the suburbs of New York, all continue to inform and inspire her work.

Through her practice of self-portraiture, she engages with the shifting cultural norms and aesthetic ideals that often frame blackness and power. Diana places herself in much of her work as both the objectified and objectifier, the ill-favored and the aspiration, the conformist and the nonconformist deconstructing ideas around purity, power, beauty and the female body.

Diana is also a farmer and founder of Holy Forest Farms and a graduate of Columbia University. She currently lives in upstate New York.