Qiana Ellis is a Californian artist whose practice moves between textiles, metal, drawing, and photography.

A woman with curly hair wearing a black dress poses with her eyes closed and one hand on her hip in front of a geometric patterned backdrop.
Hand holding three metallic flowers with long, curved stems against a black-and-white checkered floor.
Photo of a person holding a black and white intricately patterned illustration of a butterfly. The background shows various art prints and posters featuring female figures, mythological creatures, and nature scenes.
A woman dressed in vintage style clothing with jewelry, sitting outdoors in a green field with rolling hills and a partly cloudy sky in the background.
Green and white abstract patterned fabric wall hanging with organic shapes, hanging on a white wall.

Her work is shaped by an ethos of slow craft, material curiosity, improvisation, and the power of dreaming. She believes in the poetry of piecework: how fragments hold the ability to become structures and how familiar forms can be taken apart, reimagined, and reassembled into something new. She snips, tears, forges, draws, joins, observes, arranges, and recombines. She uses improvisation to find relationships, to create meaning from chaos, and to discover what life remains in discarded materials.