Bio

Marissa Caputo is a contemporary abstract painter and dancer based in the Bay Area. She grew up painting the hills of Sonoma County alongside her artist mother. Knowing that art was of significant importance to her, she attended specialized visual art and dance programs in high school, and then went on to pursue a career in graphic design and packaging design at Parsons and FIT in NYC. Her career in graphic design spanned 13 years  until she began listening to her heart’s deeper calling of art. 

As she started to pivot to creating more art, tuning in more deeply to her truth and the wisdom of the body, she has begun to experience more aliveness within herself and within her paintings. Turning to the body as resource, and connecting the process of creating art with the present-moment experience of the body has completely changed her practice. This process was heavily influenced by her recent completion of Tamalpa Level 1 expressive arts program, which acted as a dramatic opening and reclamation of the body as wisdom holder of truth-telling expression. To Marissa, painting is like coming home, bringing coherence to heart, body, mind and spirit.   

Marissa has led somatic embodied painting workshops in the past at artist retreats, and will be offering more local day-sessions in late 2026. This has been a powerful experience for those who have attended, allowing participants to drop into the body deeply, in this unique ceremony and guided journey of self exploration, expression, and play. She explores blending dance and painting together, to bring movement and life to mark-making and being present to in-the-moment body sensation as a painting takes shape.

Statement

Marissa’s paintings are a conversation and an intuitive dance between somatic sensation, felt emotion, and untold truths that yearn to be expressed and witnessed. Gesture and form become energetic signatures — abstract marks of memory, present body attunement, and a mystical collision of time and dreamscape. The joy is in the discovery.

Her work is maximalist and bold because what it holds is vast. Each layer of acrylic and mixed media becomes a place of self-inquiry, exploring the tension between clarity and uncertainty, what lies beneath the surface. It's the many deaths and rebirths in a lifetime, honoring the wisdom in both and finding delight and aliveness in them. Oscillating between playful optimism and rebellious, unapologetic expression. Each piece becomes a record of lived, felt experience.

After years of living quietly in a repressed body, Marissa’s work gives space to the voices that want to be heard, loud or soft. She’s heavily influenced by graphic design and urban street art — the people's art, raw and communal, giving voice to culture and connection. It makes the invisible visible, exposed, alive, beautifully vulnerable. At the heart of it, this is a practice of connection: her truth meeting yours, reconnecting us as whole.

EXHIBITS & GROUP SHOWS

UPCOMING
September 2026

Solo Show at Jack London Square Realty

2019

Lottie Rose Art Collective
5 Year Anniversary Show

2003

Oxbow Final Show

2005

ArtQuest Showcase

EDUCATION

2013

Fashion Institute of Technology, BFA

2012

Polimoda School, Florence
Continuing Education Studies

2008

Parsons the New School for Design,
Undergrad Foundation Studies

2003

The Oxbow School
Semester Intensive Art School

To inquire about paintings, exhibits and commissions, and workshops, please email Marissa at marissarcaputo@gmail.com