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Alessandra Stradella

Bio

Alessandra Stradella is a Philadelphia-based abstract painter and philosophy professor, born and raised in Venice, Italy. Her Italian roots, combined with her love for travel and her love for the new, remain central to her life and work. This movement across places and disciplines shapes both her artistic practice and philosophical inquiry.

She began her creative career in Italy as a professional actress in the theater. Her stage training informs her painting practice through an attention to presence and embodied action. Working primarily with acrylics, she builds surfaces through layered gestures and intuitive mark-making. Gesture and the body still play a central role, from the stage to the canvas. Stradella has participated in various international artist residencies and has presented two solo exhibitions in Philadelphia.

She earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University in Atlanta and currently teaches humanities and philosophy at the Community College of Philadelphia, where her pedagogy emphasizes self-reflection and experiential engagement with ideas. Her interdisciplinary interests—including philosophy, theater, yoga, tango dancing, and meditation—ground her work in questions of perception, habit, and ritual.

Statement

“I love questioning. I thrive in the complexity of things. What I do as an artist inhabits this territory. I used to think of painting as something opposed to philosophy, free of concepts and language. At the time, the distinction felt necessary; it was the narrative I needed to make space for my work. I now see how philosophy and painting complement each other in their ways of being in the world.

I live my practice as a form of meditation, grounded in attention and the difficult exercise of detachment. Appreciating the process. Embodying the experience.

I work primarily with acrylics. I flee from representation and predetermined outcomes. I prefer being surprised, that’s how I feel alive. I am interested in layered gestures and repetition. In slowness and bodily involvement. The surface of each painting records a series of decisions, returns, and hesitations. I embrace it as a practice of attention rather than resolution.

My current work marks a return to larger-scale paintings that invite more direct bodily interaction. This is where my practice first began. Now I understand more clearly what draws me there, although perhaps the reason itself is beside the point.”

“I love questioning. I thrive in the complexity of things. What I do as an artist inhabits this territory. I used to think of painting as something opposed to philosophy, free of concepts and language. At the time, the distinction felt necessary; it was the narrative I needed to make space for my work. I now see how philosophy and painting complement each other in their ways of being in the world.

I live my practice as a form of meditation, grounded in attention and the difficult exercise of detachment. Appreciating the process. Embodying the experience.

I work primarily with acrylics. I flee from representation and predetermined outcomes. I prefer being surprised, that’s how I feel alive. I am interested in layered gestures and repetition. In slowness and bodily involvement. The surface of each painting records a series of decisions, returns, and hesitations. I embrace it as a practice of attention rather than resolution.

My current work marks a return to larger-scale paintings that invite more direct bodily interaction. This is where my practice first began. Now I understand more clearly what draws me there, although perhaps the reason itself is beside the point.”