Alisha Sofia (b. 1987, Los Angeles) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before completing her degree at ArtCenter College of Design in 2009. She lives and works in Paris.
Alisha Sofia’s paintings inhabit the threshold between the visible world and the unconscious. Working from dreams, memory, and symbolic imagination, she explores the invisible forces that shape human experience; longing, transformation, vulnerability, and the quiet mysteries that exist beneath language. Her figures emerge suspended between tenderness and defiance, intimacy and solitude, carrying an emotional presence that feels at once deeply personal and universally resonant.
Rather than depicting events, she paints states of being. Each work unfolds as a psychological landscape where symbolism functions not as illustration, but as a language through which the inner world becomes visible. Animals, botanical forms, and recurring motifs become vessels for memory and emotion, inviting contemplation rather than explanation.
Balancing technical precision with emotional ambiguity, Sofia creates paintings that resist fixed interpretation. Instead, they offer space for reflection, allowing meaning to emerge slowly through the viewer’s own experience. Her practice seeks not to resolve mystery, but to preserve it. Creating images that linger in memory long after they are seen.