VIENNE REA is an American-born, multidisciplinary visual artist, jewelry designer, and writer whose emotionally expressive work has been featured in international, national, and regional exhibitions and gallery shows. She develops bodies of work that explore personal and collective experience through an emotionally attentive lens. Created in series, her pieces are connected by an intention to invite reflection, allowing meaning to unfold slowly for the viewer.
With over forty years as a fine art photographer, VIENNE REA’s work has been presented in prestigious venues including the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Foto Biennale in Berlin. Her photography engages emotionally driven themes shaped by personal experience and a compassionate attentiveness to the histories of others. Across multiple series, she has explored narratives such as the Holocaust of WWII, African-American slavery, childhood, divinity, and the collective feminine, while continuing to develop new thematic directions.
VIENNE’s photographic style draws from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Pictorialist movement, reinterpreted through a contemporary lens. Her use of intentional blur has become a defining element of her work, introducing an emotional permeability that deepens its narrative presence. Through poetic light, shadow, and stylized toning, her compositions convey states such as anguish, strength, tenderness, and serenity. The resulting images invite viewers into an intimate narrative space, where memory feels both personal and collective.
As a sculptor, VIENNE REA’s practice evolved through distinct phases. Her earliest sculptural explorations grew out of photography, in which she began framing her photographs with acrylic, metal, and hardware. That physical intervention naturally led her into sculptural exploration by applying those same materials directly to finished paintings, transforming two-dimensional works into three-dimensional hybrid compositions that functioned as both painting and sculpture. In 2013, a vivid dream inspired a decisive shift in her sculptural language, giving rise to the LADDER Series.
The ladder, as both symbol and form, emerged as a primary, singular theme for visually expressing stories of the human experience—her own and others'. Blending traditional and unconventional materials, she forged a distinct visual language through several dozen ladder sculptures, working across acrylic, glass, wood, found objects used in her familiar assemblage style, and metal. The latter required welding skills, which led her to undertake a brief apprenticeship with renowned sculptor David Hess, which provided direct immersion in a working studio.
Since her early studio experience, the LADDER Series has expanded into a sustained body of work. It has been exhibited in seventeen shows over the past thirteen years and recognized with six awards, including a 2025 Exhibition Honorarium from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Each LADDER Series sculpture offers a place of encounter, where the viewer’s lived experience engages with the expressive narrative embedded in the work.
VIENNE REA’s artistic practice continues to naturally expand. Jewelry design has offered a direct extension of her sculptural work. Through this shift in scale, she brings the same expressive focus of her fine art into objects meant to adorn. Each piece from the THE LOVE LADDERS collection enters an individual collector’s life as a faithful companion, and will remain through the years until memory and meaning wrap around it and settle into their heart.
Writing completes the arc of VIENNE REA’s creative practice, extending her lifelong engagement with expression and story. Through VIENNE REA WRiTES, she develops narrative work shaped by lived experience and emotional intelligence. Her writing offers another place of connection, grounded in soulful reverie.
Memberships, past and present:
American Society of Media Photographers
Professional Women Photographers
American Women Artists
Women's Photo Alliance
Maryland Federation of Art
National Sculpture Society
Washington Sculptors Group
Texas Photographic Society
The Center for Fine Art Photography
