I live in San Francisco with my husband Jay, in a tiny apartment in the Mission District. As a new girl to the city, I love exploring the different pockets and neighborhoods, sniffing all of the rose bushes and dodging the piles of human detritus on the sidewalks of the Mission. In addition to painting and drawing, I am a freelance illustrator and writer.

At the intersection of fashion, photography, film, stagecraft, and design, artist Marina Fini creates hallucinatory, alternative worlds. Based in California, she collaborates with friends and artists alike in the staging of these otherworldly scenes, using colorful costumes and her own handmade, plexiglass jewelry to turn her photographic subjects into ethereal cyber goddesses. When asked how she builds these characters, Fini remarked, “there’s something about transforming someone into someone they wouldn’t normally be … that is, creating an extension of themselves that I see in them.” All of her characters exude a captivating power, like the whimsical and intangible figures seen through a psychedelic dream. By exploring alternative selves in familiar contexts – a convenience store, or the Californian seaside, for example – Fini explores how subjecthood is fluid, and how such creative “shape-shifting” can alter the way we perceive our immediate reality.

My work can be described as a body of research in which different moments in time and space run together in a field that seems to embody a determination of time to present proof of it’s discrete, unique moments. I create stories that rise around the system of time and space. I’m fascinated by the systems that exist behind the direct surface of the visual world.

Mexican director based in London

Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien