Leyla Shapiro is an interdisciplinary painter and educator whose work holds a mirror to New York State — condensing time, movement, and its people into a single charged image.

My work serves as a mirror of New York State, in its entirety. I study archetypes in their natural state, and compress time and movement, distilling one's essence into a single two-dimensional image: primarily in acrylic.

Everything I make answers to one perspective: a disillusionment with narratives versus reality. Subjects related to my disappointment with society run the whole gamut — human nature, internal introspection, coming of age in modern America, the web of systemic problems and their potential yet shunned solutions, the global tech industry, and beyond. In the political and corporate theatre, a stage we are all made to perform on, I probe the individuals behind the performance.

Before a mark is ever made, each subject is mapped — their timelines, relationships, and contradictions charted — and that graph is what I consult to reconstruct one unified narrative across time.

I draw inspiration from the state's cast: the mundane. The insane. The powerful and the impoverished; beautiful but ugly; intelligent yet dumb. Drawing material from the highest highs and the lowest lows. To seek knowledge and mastery is to accept rapture mixed with terror, bright lights, and dark beauty.

Risk it all. Why not? Live every day like it is your last. After all, what if it all works out?

It hardened into a rule: Risk it all. Why not? Live every day like it is your last. After all, what if it all works out?

I teach my academic, interdisciplinary, and conceptual approach to art, because nothing brings me more joy than instilling the knowledge and skills I have accrued into another human with potential to create the solutions that I cannot single-handedly construct myself. Every medium I work in — and I work in many — contributes to the same vision.