Born in New York City in 1986 Ana Benaroya’s work centers around female subjects, who have bizarre muscles. These abstract figures often upset traditional expectations and notions of femininity. Her paintings and works on paper construct a female gaze, casting women as dominant roles, with assertive, domineering, assertive, and individualistic presences. The muscles on her figures distort and ornament the bodies of her subjects, speaking to female desire and queer sensibility.

With a striking color palette, Benaroya pulls from an assemblage of pictorial language and diverse sources to assemble a distinct pictorial language. Her graphic style is familiar and her figures appear to be super-hero-like. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in 2008 and from Yale University with an MFA in painting in 2019. Benaroya currently lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.