Natalie Strait is a painter living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Through a semi-autobiographic and queer lens, her paintings explore personal and psychological lived realities of womanhood, navigating the interplay between emotional vulnerability and gendered, social-media-enforced performativity. Her work implores audiences to question their preconceived notions in how they view women, and her painted figures defy gendered conventions by taking up space, their bodies dancing between representation and painterly abstraction. She holds a BFA in Painting from Arizona State University, and a MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2020).