Ariel Arakas is a Richmond based multi-media artist and filmmaker. Ariel grew up in a suburban beach town, in grade school she attended an academy where she was trained in practical arts such as metal-smithing, welding, architecture, and design. After starting her undergraduate career at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) she began the transition to filmmaking after some brief experimentation with darkroom photography. As a young girl she observed her father use movies as a form of escapism and quickly developed a crush on film’s ability to consume the viewer in an alternate reality. This, coupled with her affinity for music video stars like Madonna, made motion picture film the logical next step.

Through out all mediums of her work runs a conceptual vein of female sexuality, spirituality, eroticism, and gender issues. Most of the narratives present are abstractions of autobiographical events, and the models or performers are typically amateur. Stylistically, she is concerned with capturing real reactions in constructed or controlled spaces.

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