Leah Grace Craig

Craig is a figurative painter based in Atlanta, Georgia, completing a B.F.A. in Painting with a minor in Printmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD, 2025). Raised amid the misty peaks of Highlands, North Carolina, where she spent much of her time immersed in the natural world, Craig absorbed the region’s atmospheric light, shifting mists, and raw wilderness—elements that continue to influence her dreams and subsequently the dreamlike landscapes and organic forms. She has a deep and spiritual reverence for nature that permeates her practice. Ethereal portraits of women adrift in clouds, encompassed by flowers and animals that blend into one another’s skins, where softness and serenity veil deeper narratives of resilience, grief, and the power of the female and bodily existence.

Craig’s large-scale oil paintings balance classical technique with contemporary symbolism, inviting viewers to confront vulnerability in a softer, more approachable form. The series explores dreams shaped by self-reflection, femininity, and transformation—surreal, tender portrayals of women in liminal spaces where grief and beauty coexist. This body of work will anchor her first solo exhibition later this year.

Her series “The Divine Now” premiered in 2025 at SCAD’s resurrected Fine Arts Showcase and then at their Out to Launch event, where she is still a spotlight artist.

Craig’s practice is driven by disciplined exploration of the subconscious, dream-based ideation, and an unwavering belief that beauty and darkness can coexist on the same canvas, one illuminating the other, just as calm and chaos must coexist simultaneously in nature to achieve harmony.

Craig has been a peer mentor in painting studios and worked as a printmaking shop monitor for three years. She regularly assists printmaking faculty at SCAD and other artists’ private studios, doing photogravure, lithography, etching, and relief projects. She frequently collaborates with interdisciplinary teams on museum-quality installations. She has worked as an artist assistant to several master painters and printmakers from Georgia to California.