Sasha Samuels

Artist and designer Sasha Samuels creates in profoundly disparate cultures; Silicon Valley and Italy. Her Tuscan studio was for a time a 14th century Romanesque church outside Arezzo. In more recent years, her artistic epicenter has shifted west to Florence.

Raised in New York in an artistic family, her teenage years were spent creating hyper-realistic pencil drawings. At age eighteen Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward commissioned her for portraits of their family’s horses. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, she took her senior year abroad as a member of her school’s European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. For decades, Samuels studied artistic anatomy, including seven years figure painting with artist Arvie Smith, a 2022 Venice Biennale exhibitor.

Over the years she studied with Italian masters in Florentine mosaic (pietre dure), cameo carving (in shell and hard stone), blacksmithing, and oil painting. Finding her cultural community in Florence’s Oltrarno, her poetic homage to Artemisia Gentileschi was published in 2022’s Oltrarno Gaze, and a plein air watercolor included in Il Palmerino’s Return Home – Lola Costa exhibition in 2024.

She recently visited Ukraine to paint watercolor portraits of their defenders recovering from war injuries, gifting each soldier his portrait. As a result of her journey there, she proposed and co-curated an exhibition of contemporary Ukrainian trench art at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, NM in 2024.

A designer goldsmith and artisan by trade, her jewelry and paintings have garnered over two dozen awards in juried exhibitions including in the Museo Archeologico in Salerno, Italy.

She currently finds inspiration in the works of Pontormo, Casorati, the Machiaioli, and Bronzino’s portraiture.