JoAnna Commandaros is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she currently lives and works. Her drawings, sculptures, and installations are inspired by alchemy, cultural aesthetics, and ecological systems. Her work involves exploration of diverse cultural relationships with the environment, reflective of her Greek and Syrian roots. She has participated in residencies abroad, in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and Greece, and values interactions with diverse cultures and practices. Educated in both craft and sculpture media, she embraces the visual field through a sensitivity to touch. Her exhibitions nationally and internationally have traversed these two traditions.

She utilizes domestic craft techniques such as felting, wool, and wire weaving inspired by hyperbolic crocheting. These processes serve as a personal contemplation of the ecological environment and nature’s mysteries. Concepts of the sublime in nature are displayed visually in many of her pieces, which use fractal geometry and the rhizome’s inherent multiplicities of dimension and direction.

This practice has broadened to the social arena through the production of interactive installations and public works in local disenfranchised neighborhoods.

Seeking spiritual commonality in our post-modern culture, her work is meant to re-sentualize an increasingly mechanized, computerized, and mass-produced world.