Ren (they/them) is from a small town in southern Appalachia where they grew up climbing trees, watching fireflies, and searching for salamanders in the creek at their grandma’s house. After graduating from Carleton College with a degree in studio art and art history in 2024, they moved to New Haven, Connecticut to pursue their master’s degree in arts and religion at Yale University.

Ren typically describes themselves using the word “painter” but is starting to think the words “observer,” “listener,” or “explorer” may be more apt to describe their work. They consider their practice to exist in two parts, the first, an inhale- to observe the world, the second, an exhale- to create.

Much of Ren’s work considers the fragility of the body and the often-contradictory nature of inner and outer worlds, dissonance between “real” and “remembered” pasts, and differences in what is seen and what is felt. As a trans and disabled artist, Ren spends a lot of time thinking about the incongruencies between their own body and mind; their art attempts to represent bodies that are not quite right, caught at moments just before the ground falls from beneath their feet or as they fail to define themselves against the background.