Meet the Artists of THE BLANC Studios
THE BLANC is pleased to introduce the artists joining its Artist Studios community in Midtown Manhattan. Working across painting, sculpture, textiles, performance, sound, animation, and interactive media, these thirteen artists bring distinct perspectives to a shared environment for artistic exploration and exchange.
Their practices engage with memory, identity, material transformation, perception, and the relationships between personal experience and public life. Together, they reflect the interdisciplinary spirit of THE BLANC Artist Studios—a place where artists can develop their work, connect across disciplines, and contribute to New York’s arts community.
Shweta Balakrishnan is an artist, fashion designer, and entrepreneur originally from Bangalore, India. Her practice is informed by her experience moving between India and the United States and explores giving and sharing love. At the Maryland Institute College of Art, she is pursuing a BFA in Painting and Fibers, with minors in Experimental Fashion and Creative Entrepreneurship. Her first solo exhibition, Journey of My Life, took place in 2020. Alongside her studies, Balakrishnan has been developing her fashion practice through a design and production internship with Bibhu Mohapatra in New York City.
Website: www.shwetabalakhnan.com
Birgit Hazlin’s practice has developed across Germany, Malaysia, and the United States, reflecting a sustained interest in change, discovery, and transformation. Beginning with watercolor and plaster relief, she later explored acrylic, oil, and ink before discovering encaustic. Working with hot wax and pigment, Hazlin builds layered surfaces through accumulation and fusion, allowing earlier marks to remain visible. For her, these traces become a metaphor for lived experience: each impression adds depth and shapes what follows. Her work examines time and memory through the materials and processes of making.
Website: https://birgithazlin.com
Sam He is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, animation, and interactive installation. Her practice creates disorienting environments where psychological experience and physical space converge, examining the contemporary self through relationships between inner experience and surrounding space. She received her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the Mount Royal School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Maryland, San Juan, Venice, Fukuoka, Barcelona, and Guangzhou, reflecting the international reach of her interdisciplinary practice.
Website: samhe.net
Delia Hou is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist working in oil painting, performance, sculpture, and digital media under the pseudonym Plastiqu33n. Her “No-Edge” paintings explore atmosphere and perception through layered color and softened boundaries, while her performance and digital works use the body, humor, and social rituals to question familiar categories. Her background spans astrophysics, law, and tango, alongside experiences living in the United States, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Argentina. Hou has exhibited in New York and Buenos Aires and founded El Lobby, an artist studio and exhibition space in Buenos Aires, in 2023.
Website: https://www.deliahou.com
Christine Kwon explores memory, inherited experience, light, and perception through layered abstract painting. Rooted in her Korean heritage and her mother’s childhood memories, her practice considers how experience is carried and transformed through color, material, and form. Her background in interior design informs her attention to spatial relationships and structure. Working with translucent acrylic layers, organic forms, geometric elements, and mixed media, Kwon creates surfaces in which colors overlap and dissolve. Her recent paintings emphasize atmosphere, inviting viewers to slow their perception and connect with their own memories.
Website: https://www.christinekwon.com
Lerato Ngobeni is a South African figurative artist living and working in New York City. Raised in Johannesburg, she explores visibility, identity, and representation, often centering the experiences of women, children, and communities. Through oil painting and mixed-media charcoal installations, she combines fragmented settings with monumental figures, using materials such as Unryu paper and oaktag to express vulnerability and resilience. Social engagement and storytelling are central to her practice. Ngobeni holds a bachelor’s degree from Vaal University of Technology and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art.
Website: https://linktr.ee/Leratongobeni
Francesca Nrecaj-Hecht is a New York–based artist working across painting, textiles, and sculptural relief. Combining plaster, fabric, acrylic, and industrial materials, she creates tactile works that explore containment, rupture, preservation, and exposure. Her practice draws on personal history and Albanian textile traditions, including dowry customs, domestic rituals, and inherited handwork. Through sculptural busts and abstract reliefs, she considers the body as a carrier of pain, burden, and resilience. Draped, scarred, and ruptured surfaces give material form to the lasting effects of the experiences people carry.
Website: https://francescanrecajhecht.com/
Anne Sherwood Pundyk is an artist and writer based in Manhattan and Mattituck, New York. Her paintings bring together abstraction, textiles, and storytelling, with recent research at the Clyfford Still Museum informing her exploration of generational trauma. Across more than thirty-five years of making, exhibiting, and writing about art, she has used everyday materials to question convention. Her work has been exhibited at East End Arts, Queens College Art Center, and Susan Eley Fine Art, among other venues, and reviewed in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Washington Post.
Website: Annesherwoodpundyk.com
Born in Manila and based in New York City, Jenny Santi is a Filipino painter whose work moves between abstraction and representation. Botanical forms, imagined landscapes, and intuitive mark-making explore the psychological experience of nature through an urban perspective. She trained at the Florence Academy of Art and the Art Students League of New York, where she was selected for its Career Development Program for Emerging Artists. Her work has appeared at the National Arts Club and the Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts. Santi is also a licensed psychotherapist and the author of The Giving Way to Happiness.
Website: jennysanti.com
Tina Scepanovic works across sculpture and installation, bringing historical craft techniques into conversation with contemporary forms. With a background in furniture restoration, she incorporates repurposed vintage materials and decorative finishes into objects that feel both familiar and subtly unsettling. She trained in historical hand-painted finishes at the Isabel O’Neil Studio in New York and studied traditional water gilding with Charles Douglas. Her work has been exhibited at Salon Art + Design, featured in The New York Times, and acquired by private collections around the world.
Website: tinascepanovic.com
Anna Danyang Song is an artist originally from China whose background combines ceramics, teaching, and research. She holds a BFA from Tsinghua University and an MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently serves as a faculty member and ceramic studio manager at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the RISD Museum, THE BLANC Gallery, and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and is held in the collections of Harvard Art Museums and Tsinghua University. Her honors include the 2024 NCECA Multicultural Fellowship.
Website: https://www.danyangart.com
Yi Yang is a New York–based multimedia artist working with wearable devices, sculpture, interactive installation, sound, and video. Their practice spans objects, technology, and time-based media, bringing these forms into dialogue through interactive work. Yi received a BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently teaches at Pratt Institute. Their work has been exhibited at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing, the RISD Museum, and the CICA Museum in South Korea.
Website: https://yiyangstudio.net/
Born in Dalian, China, in 1995, Zhang Zhenyu lives and works in New York. Her paintings explore the interaction between ink’s fluidity and permeability and acrylic’s opacity and capacity to build form. Drawing on childhood calligraphy training and Eastern ink traditions, she examines cultural inheritance, diasporic experience, and the tension between chance and control. Changes in canvas orientation allow gravity and pigment to shape compositions alongside deliberate intervention. Zhang studied fine arts at Alfred University, received her BFA from California College of the Arts, and earned her MFA from Parsons School of Design.
Website: https://zhenyujeana.com
THE BLANC Artist Studios brings these individual practices into a shared setting for sustained work and conversation. As the artists develop their projects, their different approaches to materials, ideas, and lived experience create opportunities for exchange across disciplines.
We look forward to sharing their work and perspectives as they become part of THE BLANC’s evolving creative community.
