Anya Adorni is a fourth year Art-Studio major at UCSB, who transferred from Santa Barbara City College Fall 2020. Anya was raised by her single mom in Santa Monica, California, who always took care into hanging renowned art prints around their apartment. Anya’s family is from Livorno, Italy, and she hopes to pursue an MFA at an Italian Academy of Fine Arts after her time at UCSB.
Anya’s art features vibrantly colored oil paintings that utilize a satirical surrealist scope to comment upon the objectification and hypersexualization of the female body in our patriarchal society.
Anya writes short stories alongside her surrealist paintings to enhance the visual medium with flash fiction. While creating her own surrealist stories inspired by her paintings, Anya also enjoys playfully referencing past art historical pieces within her own work to either comment upon sexism within paintings of the Western canon or to tip her hat to artists that came before her.
Anya’s main focus during her participation in Gabler Promise Scholars Writing Program is finishing her sci-fi/fantasy novel that she will submit to literary agents for publication. Anya has also been painting acrylic illustrations to embed within the novel.
The novel takes place in the collapsing environment of 2051 Rome from the perspective of one of the main protagonists, Lucia. She is drawn down the steps of an old Roman well by a faint light. Lucia wakes up in a dilapidated church, where she has been unknowingly transported 500 years into the future. Here, she will encounter two societies that have emerged from the reality she once knew: one that is a peaceful utopian experiment, secrets lying beneath its idyllic surface, and one that resembles the previous ways of mankind, its leaders power driven and exploitive. Lucia is compelled to warn the utopian society of its malevolent neighbors, while also attempting to figure out a way to return to her own time, but is there anything to go back to?
Link to year-long project here.
