BIO

Annika Rhea is an immersive action painter and movement artist based in NYC. She is the creator of BODY MEDIUM, a painting technique that utilizes the body in motion as a painting tool. Her work merges visual art, performance art, and video art, exploring the relationship between motion, color, rhythm, emotion, and the flow of energy through form. Alongside BODY MEDIUM, Rhea’s Kinetic Flow and Energetic Patterns series study the interconnected systems that shape human experience and the natural world, translating movement, energy, and information into layered abstract compositions.

Rhea is a process-oriented artist inspired by the relationship between embodiment, perception, and transformation. Her work ranges from painting the emotional and energetic essence of a concept to creating visual interpretations of musical scores and complex living systems. Through movement-driven mark making and evolving networks of lines and nodes, she uses art as a way to study and translate the invisible patterns that connect people, nature, emotion, and consciousness.

Rhea has over two decades of dance training, performance experience, and cross-training in movement disciplines including ballet, modern, contemporary dance, martial arts, flow arts, Duncan technique, and Graham technique, receiving a BA in Dance from George Washington University.

Rhea began painting over a decade ago when an injury prevented her from dancing. She turned to painting as a creative outlet, allowing the paint to dance for her while using the canvas as her stage. After years of developing her practice as a movement-based abstract expressionist painter, she formally merged dance and painting in 2016 to create BODY MEDIUM.

Rhea has collaborated with musicians and videographers worldwide and creates large-scale abstract commissions in partnership with Pantone. She has performed and exhibited at galleries, festivals, luxury hotels, charity galas, and international art fairs including Miami Art Week, SCOPE Art Show, Art Basel, Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Clio Art Fair, Art With Me, and Brooklyn Fashion Week. Her work has also been featured at Box Factory Gallery and Haas Art Gallery. She was selected as Artist in Residence for The Box Factory NYC in 2020, Loews Hotel Miami during Art Basel in 2021, and Mind Studios during Art Basel Switzerland in 2023, and presented her solo exhibition, Traces, at EP Gallery in 2025.