About Diana Riukas

As a lifelong award-winning artist who became legally blind with partial vision 20 years ago, my work has evolved through adapting to changing ways of seeing. My imagery is often figurative, but moves between representation, abstraction, intuition, and spiritual feeling. I am drawn to imagery that feels layered, expressive, and slightly otherworldly.

My practice includes acrylic painting, mixed media, collage, and digital processes. Vision loss led me to develop new approaches to image-making that blend painting, collage, abstraction, and digital processes. In recent work, I have been exploring the relationship between hand-made marks and technology, including how digital imagery can be altered, interrupted, and transformed through physical process.

I hold a B.A. in Art from West Chester University, an M.Ed. in Art Education from Tyler School of Art, and an MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. My work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and institutions nationwide, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, and Trenton City Museum, and is held in public and private collections worldwide.

I live in the Philadelphia suburbs in a 200-year-old house with my husband and two fur babies.

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For over twenty years, my work has been shaped by adapting to vision loss after becoming legally blind with low vision. As a lifelong artist, losing visual clarity pushed me away from realism and toward finding new ways to create imagery through color, emotion, memory, intuition, and mixed media processes.

In earlier work, I developed methods of combining digitally altered collage imagery with acrylic painting as a way to work around the limitations caused by my vision disability. Using photographic elements manipulated digitally, I would integrate collage and paint until the boundaries between them disappeared.

Today my work is moving in a different direction.

Rather than concealing the relationship between digital and handmade processes, I intentionally expose it. Painting, drawing, collage, digital imagery, AI-assisted imagery, physical alteration, and visible revision are allowed to coexist within the same work.

My current body of work revisits twenty paintings from different periods of my practice that I once considered finished. Instead of treating them as completed objects, I reopen them as living material. Some are altered through paint, some through digital intervention, some through collage, and some through destruction and reconstruction. Each receives a different treatment, yet all explore the same question:

What does perception look like in the age of AI?

By exposing seams, revisions, interruptions, and layered histories, the work examines the shifting relationship between human perception, machine-generated imagery, memory, and authorship. The paintings become conversations between past and present, finished and unfinished, handmade and digital.

At its core, my practice is about adaptation, transformation, and the evolving nature of seeing.

Curriculum Vitae

Diana Riukas

Statement