Artist Profile: Elsa Zanandrea-Stern

Overview:
Elsa Zanandrea-Stern is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores communication, memory, and emotional legibility through sculpture, painting, and installation. With a practice grounded in both conceptual rigor and material experimentation, she draws from fleeting urban moments and overlooked materials to create works that offer space for shared reflection. Whether working with clay, discarded signage, or street-found objects, Elsa seeks to blur the line between public residue and private meaning. Influenced by artists like Maya Lin and Kara Walker, her installations foster dialogue around exclusion, tenderness, and transformation. Through Studio Summer, Elsa returns to illustrative and painterly forms to expand her sculptural voice and reconnect with risk-driven, community-oriented making.