Aineki Traverso employs the rhetoric of painting to articulate a personal narrative rooted in poetics and impossibility. Aineki's filmmaking background provides a conceptual and material foundation for a phenomenological approach to painting, in which site-specific installations serve as allusions to the gaze, the lens, architectural space, and situational aesthetics. The iconography in the paintings is derived from a personal archive that includes inherited and found materials, the foundation of which relies on thousands of family photos that span generations and homelands and contain multitudes of histories, memories, and fantasies.

Aineki Traverso (b. 1991, Washington, DC) is a painter based in Atlanta and a current resident in the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary. Traverso is a 2024 recipient of the Artadia Award as well as the foundation’s inaugural SEEN Award. Traverso’s work has most recently been exhibited in spaces such as Swan Coach House Gallery, Johnson Lowe, and Whitespace Gallery. Aineki has attended residencies at R&F Handmade Paints, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and VCCA. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 with a concentration in film theory.