Chelsea Owens is an international artist currently living and painting between two diverse cultures and homes in Southern California and Northern Italy. Her early appreciation of mural painting and theatrical design led her to attend programs at the Corcoran School of Art during her high school years and to study fine arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She studied abroad in the South of France in an intense program for painting, illustration, and art history before leaving the East Coast for San Francisco. Chelsea transitioned into multimedia and production design and worked within the Production Design department for the film division at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where she graduated with honors.

In her years at the Academy, Chelsea developed many lasting professional and creative relationships with both faculty and students. Ultimately, she produced an extensive body of work recognized in numerous AAU film festivals as well as the AAU Perspective Magazine. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of a film production career, designing sets for a feature film and Pink’s “Trouble” MTV music video.  She has since gone on to collaborate with many individuals on film, theatre, and event productions.

After falling in love with an Italian, whom she married several years later, she moved to Europe to live, observe, and paint outside of Milan.  Her experience over the last seven years as a foreign woman in a dominantly male society is represented in the series, Adaptation, which recently showed at the Lorton Arts Center, in Washington, D.C. This transformative series of oil paintings reflects a woman limited by language who finds painting to be a dominant form of communication in a new and foreign landscape.

Chelsea’s years in the bohemian sub-culture of San Francisco, as well as being a child of counter-culture hippie parents, gave her a love of the dramatic and surreal. Each composition in the Adaptation series presents a staged scene and open curtain to the character’s journey: adaptation, reflection, and subsequent evolution.  Forms suggest the playful nature of life as theater, which is influenced by her fine arts and production design foundation.

Chelsea currently resides in Italy and frequently travels back to sweet home, California.  She has had exhibits in Italy and in the United States.  She has painting collections available for exhibit and sale in both countries.