Serena Mitnik-Miller (b. 1981, Massachusetts)

Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Serena Mitnik-Miller is a painter whose work explores the balance between repetition and variation, structure and spontaneity. Working in watercolor on paper, she creates layered compositions through hand-drawn lines, geometric forms, and transparent washes. Each painting is built slowly, through a process that is both intuitive and precise—where gesture, rhythm, and material guide the outcome. What results is a visual language that feels at once methodical and formal yet deeply personal and open.

Her practice has developed over years of focused work shaped by both place and process. Time in the Bay Area laid the foundation for a material-led, rhythm-driven approach that continues to define her work. Now based in the mountains of Los Angeles near the Pacific, she also spends significant time in the desert, she draws from the light, stillness, and openness found in both settings. These qualities surface through the work in quiet ways, as spatial and emotional cues—quietly embedded in the balance, structure, movement, and tone of the work.

Mitnik-Miller’s paintings sit within a West Coast lineage that includes the reductive clarity of minimalism and the perceptual sensitivity of the Light and Space movement. Her work resists spectacle, inviting instead a slower, more sustained kind of looking. Each composition is shaped entirely by hand, built through repetition and revision. The simplicity of form belies the complexity of its making—a process rooted in attention, restraint, and the material intelligence of working analog.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, and other international venues, and is included in the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. She received her B.A. in Photography and Printmaking from the University of California, Santa Cruz.