about

Diana Blain Fine explores themes and conversations around conformity, the evolution of gender norms in media and the marketplace and how they relate to blackness and power in post-colonial Africa and the West. Her work fuses her background in sociology with the intimate and introspective practice of self-portraiture to challenge aesthetic ideals and gaze upon the effects they have on our interiority. Her fascination with the transformative aspects of photography began in front of the camera where she began experimenting with elements of abstraction and symbolism, light, color, prosthetics and found objects to create constructed images that tell stories that evoke the complexity and contradiction of identity.

Born in The Gambia into a politically prominent Gambian family involved in the Pan African Arts movement, Gambian independence and post-dictatorship politics, Diana was raised across continents. She has lived in the U.K., Pakistan, Liberia, NY and Indonesia and has traveled extensively around the globe. Her personal experiences living under state-sanctioned military dictatorship in Southeast Asia, as a young teen witnessing the dawn of a military coup in Liberia, as an immigrant thrown into white suburbia in New York and as an adult witnessing the trajectory of global political movements all continue to inform and inspire her work.

Diana is a graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. degree in Sociology. She lives squirreled away in rural upstate New York with occasionally good cell service and shoddy WiFi.