about

Diana Blain Fine is a visual artist from The Gambia whose works across photography and collage represents 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 Arts movement, collaborative peace talks, Gambian independence and post-dictatorship politics, 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 state-sanctioned military dictatorship in SE Asia, as a young teen witnessing the dawn of a bloody military coup in Liberia, and as an immigrant temporarily thrown into the suburbs of New York, all continue to inform and inspire her work.

Diana fuses her background in sociology with the intimate and introspective practice of self-portraiture to challenge aesthetic ideals and gaze upon their effects on our interiority. Her art practice incorporates self portraiture, use of natural and artificial light, color, prosthetics, fabric and found objects in service of creating constructed images that tell stories.

Diana is also a farmer and founder of Holy Forest Farms and a graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. degree in Sociology (2000). She currently lives in New York.