Chris Vena

About

Chris Vena is an award winning artist and educator with a national and international exhibition record spanning 25 years. He received his BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003 and was accepted into the Mobility Exchange program at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2001. In 2017, he received an MFA in Painting from Arizona State University with his thesis show entitled “Bodies Upon the Gears”, an exhibition of painting, print and photography related to the political climate of Arizona in the lead up to the 2016 election. He has curated two major figurative painting exhibitions at both Phoenix College and Mesa Community College and most recently had work featured in two exhibitions at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio as well as several shows in the Phoenix area. His work has been published in books, magazines, and academic journals and in 2019 he presented a research paper at the Representational Art Conference in Ventura, CA entitled Plato, Greenberg and the Painter's Bed: On Painting and Fascism. Recently, he was a recipient of the inaugural Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Award and exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum.