Ilana Crispi is a San Francisco based visual artist. Using ceramics, fiber, and traditional craft along with contemporary technologies and junk materials, she creates excessively crafted objects and environments. Her creations are sometimes temporary and change over time. They occupy the gallery space and extend beyond to the street and sometimes into unexpected encounters. She makes sculptures and installations of the ephemeral: shadows and footprints and the impressions of stories. She creates permanent precious objects as well as those that challenge ideas of authenticity or value. Her work often focuses on ideas of perception, the ways in which we perceive our environments and the things we desire.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Crispi has also lived and worked in Providence, New York, and Madrid. She received her MFA from Mills College and BA in Comparative Literature and Visual Arts from Brown University. She was the recipient of the Eklind Fellowship, the Resident Artist at the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums in San Francisco, and the Resident Artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in New York. Her work has been shown at conventional and alternative sites including public streets in Oakland, Artist’s Television Access, Little Tree Gallery, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose, and Shanghai Normal University Gallery in Shanghai, China. Crispi teaches at San Francisco City College and Skyline College.