Leana Spain moves through the spaces where memory falters and time leaves its trace. A Mexican American and African American artist raised in a military family, she grew up amid constant movement. Between homes, histories, and ways of belonging. These shifting landscapes shaped her understanding of identity as something never fixed, but always becoming.

Working across photography and mixed media, Spain constructs visual dialogues between the personal and the collective. Fragments of the past become images, textures, gestures and are used as the material for reimagining how we remember. Her work questions the stability of the archive, exploring what is lost, what is held, and what resists capture.

Influenced by her own lived experiences and the reverberations they create beyond the self, Spain’s practice dwells in the tension between presence and absence. Through her images, memory is not a record but a pulse constantly fading, returning, reshaping the contours of who we are.

She holds a BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York.