Artist

  Mary Rose Deraco is a Los Angeles–based visual artist whose expressive, mixed-media practice bridges the spiritual, political, and deeply personal. Working from a converted open-air garage studio perched above the Los Angeles basin, she creates large-scale, gestural works that reflect both the urgency of inner transformation and the expansive landscape around her.

Rooted in drawing, painting, collage, and writing, Deraco approaches art-making as a ritualized, therapeutic practice. Her process is immersive and physical — climbing ladders, pouring paint, and working across vast surfaces in conversation with music, movement, and intuition. The resulting work is colorful, lyrical, and emotionally resonant, often infused with themes of grief, healing, resistance, and regeneration.

Deraco’s recent series explores the impact of political conflict on the female body, engaging with issues like reproductive autonomy, identity, and collective trauma. Through the use of fragmented forms, symbolic botanicals, and ceremonial mark-making, she transforms personal experience into visual storytelling that invites connection and reflection.

For Deraco, art is not just a form of expression — it is a sacred, daily practice that opens space for witnessing, transformation, and hope. Her studio serves as both sanctuary and site of resistance, where emotion becomes image and silence gives way to voice.