BIOGRAPHY
Dana Marie Bullock is a Jamaican-born interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Bullock works across painting, sculpture, and performance to engage with themes of gender, trauma, loss, and Jamaican mythology. Her work is often self-referential, weaving familial memory with abstraction to destabilize the boundary between personal narrative and collective history.
​Bullock’s practice is grounded in materiality, using silk chiffon, gauze, metal, and stitching as extensions of lived experience and relational memory. Mark-making becomes an intentional act for Bullock, leaving visible traces of her physical presence and of histories of damage rather than concealing them.
Bullock was a 2025-2026 artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2025, graduating with outstanding merit. In 2024, she was awarded the Virginia Pratt Thayer Scholarship, the Schuback Endowed Scholarship, and the Pratt Institute’s Ox-Bow Residency Award. Bullock completed a summer residency workshop at Ox-Bow School of Art and a residency masterclass at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. She also completed a Benin Bronze Fellowship in 2026.
After earning her undergraduate degree in Social work from the University of the West Indies, Bullock studied Fine Arts with a specialization in painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. She received multiple awards in New York and has garnered media coverage in both the United States and Jamaica. Bullock has exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 2019 and 2025 and was recently featured in Volume 08 Forgotten Lands Publication, a magazine dedicated to applying Caribbean voices.
My interdisciplinary practice investigates the body as a site of cultural inscription, where material history is carried, ruptured, repaired, and sewn into the flesh. Working across painting, sculpture, and performance, I draw from self-portraiture, familial memory, and abstraction to engage with themes of gender, trauma, loss, and Jamaican mythology. My work emphasizes care and resilience as central artistic acts, drawing on my background in social work. Across media, I approach artmaking as a way to hold what has been fractured, asking how visual form can carry histories that are painful, unresolved, and deeply personal.
Departing from the convention of the tightly stretched canvas, I treat painting as a bodily form, examining the abstracted medium as a genre capable of blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. My work is given a body, damaged, resurrected, and repaired. Through processes of cutting, layering, and needlework, I stitch together interwoven histories of Western, Eastern, African, and Black cultures within Jamaica. Acts of repair function both materially and symbolically, holding tension between vulnerability and resilience.
I work with materials embedded in Jamaican cultural memory, such as silk chiffon, organza, medical gauze, metal, John Crow beads, and found objects– foregrounding their associations with domestic space, architecture, and care. Through these materials, the female body emerges as an architectural structure: a site of strength, comfort, and bravery, as well as fragility and impermanence.
Ultimately, my work develops a visual language for experiences that resist verbal articulation, confronting objectification, racialized and gendered discrimination, historical erasure, and medical injustice.