‍Bio

Emanuela Iuliana Sintamarian is an artist originally from Romania, but currently she lives and works in Oakland, CA.  

Her work is informed by the relationship between her identity to her sense of displacement, and the ways she has devised to reconcile those incongruous elements.  She is interested in perception, memory and the mechanics of motion, their visual translation, and the dichotomies intrinsic to them (transfer vs change, action vs reaction, and time linearity).

Sometimes, much of the (contemporary) life is inherently wrapped in the poetry of melancholy, loneliness, and absurd.  Ema wants her works not only to echo her impulses, desires, and thoughts, but also speak and emphasize to those attributes.  

She explores the fluidity and tension generated by contradictions: organized chaos and uncontrolled order, machine-like generated imagery, and imperfections, organized chaos and logical absurd. Ema also tends to adulterate the boundaries between representative and abstract. She leverages marks, colors, shapes, and textures to construct an undefined world, rather than mirror reality.  

Ema's work has been shown in solo and group shows at Sunny Art Center, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Constanta, Romania; Museum of Art, Arad, Romania; Triton Museum in Santa Clara, CA; Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, CA; the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, DE; Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia; Niklas Belenius Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, CA and Angel Orensanz Foundation, New York, NY.  

She was the recipient of the Leigh Weimer Award, (2021), the Artist Award SVCreates, San Jose, CA (2020), the Golden Foundation Fellowship, Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY (2018), the Eureka Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, CA (2013), ArtShift Award (2008) and the Silicon Valley Arts Council Award (2010). She is the finalist for the Sunny Art Award (2021), and has been nominated for SECA-SFMOMA-History Art Award, SF, CA  

Ema received her first MFA in printmaking from University of Delaware, and her second MFA in painting from San Jose State University. She is a Professor Associated at San Jose City College.

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