Rena D. Cruz
Residency:
Airport Campus

Rena Dillon Cruz is an artist based in Santa Monica, whose practice includes painting, collage, and drawing. She is inspired by the natural world, art history, the human form, and the conceptual; she is in love with color, texture, line, forms found in nature, paper, and the idea of bringing a dreamscape quality into the everyday. Rena has developed an image vocabulary of beautiful, universal, and evocative representation: the figure, trees, the human heart, a hand, birds in flight, flowers. 

Rena has exhibited in art walks and open studios; her works can be found in private collections around the world. She spent a year in New York City attending the School of Visual Art and interning for painters Miriam Shapiro, Budd Hopkins and Power Booth in her early career. This led to her working as a set decorator in NYC in the 1990’s, working largely in film and TV for artists ranging from Spike Lee to Nickelodeon. Family life later took her away from pursuing painting, but motherhood inspired a love for community art and education; with her children in school, she worked closely with their teachers to create programs to connect history and language lessons with the arts. Rena is also trained by Art4Healing: Expressing Feelings w/Color, and facilitates workshops specializing in emotional healing and release through painting via her HeartArts organization. She received a BA in Art from the College of Wooster in 1986.

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