About

Biography

Ioana Vrabie is an award-winning fine art photographer, based in Barcelona, Spain.

Celebrated for her evocative and introspective imagery, her work centers around the relationship between experience and memory, between the conscious and the subconscious – creating experimental analog photographs that induce a daydream state in the viewer.

Ioana was born in Transylvania, Romania and raised in Tuscany, Italy. After completing her Classical studies in high school – where her favorite subject matter was history of art – she embarked onto a Bachelor degree in Science of Communication – where her favorite subject matter was history and criticism of cinema.

Following her studies, she worked as a photography studio manager in the fashion industry in Milan. In 2002 she became a flight attendant and started living a “restless life” while travelling around the World, experiencing a constant change of scenery and developing a fascination with psychology, in particular with how our brain, our memories, visualisations and dreams work.

From 2011, she decided to take her passion for photography to the next level and enrolled at the University of the Arts London. After working as a commercial photographer she realised that she could only truly express her vision through fine art photography, specifically experimental photography.

To further strengthen her artistic voice and master her craft, she got more and more into analog and experimental photography over the years, participating in multiple courses and working at the renowned Photo Fusion camera club in London.
It was where she received a serendipitous gift from a stranger: a bag full of expired film rolls that she took to experiment on an extended trip to Italy, India and Bali – a pivotal moment that led to the work she does today.

Ioana Vrabie’s work has been recognized in prestigious international competitions, including International Color Awards, International Photography Awards (IPA), Visual Art Open, Refocus Awards and the Bridgeman Studio Award.

Her photographs belong to private collections in United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Italy.

Her work has been published in esteemed platforms like Artdoc and showcased in various exhibitions that highlight her distinctive approach to storytelling.

Drawing inspiration from her ceaseless travels and personal narrative, Ioana continues to create work that transcends an ever changing reality, inviting the viewer to daydream and revealing the universal and timeless beauty that connects us all.

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Artist statement

My evocative, multi-layered, analogue and experimental photographs feature landscapes that exist beyond the tangible. They are visualizations of the quiet magic of daydreaming—an inner sanctuary born from my tension between fleeing a dysfunctional home and searching for a place to belong. They open a space between conscious intention and subconscious whispers, where imagination softens the harshness of reality.

What started as an instinctive coping mechanism to release constant, traumatic restlessness unexpectedly became the foundation of my artistic practice.

Photography first revealed what I carried inside: my own images are the reflection of a heightened flight response that propelled me to move more than thirty times and to search for relief through psychotherapy, meditation, and holistic practices.

Only later I understood its transformative role: photography can be an active meditation, scientifically shown to encourage the hippocampus to grow and the amygdala to shrink—literally reshaping a brain marked by PTSD.

Hence, my both intuitive and calculated creationary process grows from this fertile ground, refined through a decade of working with multi-exposure photography.

I start by walking in the space and opening all my senses to infuse myself with the beauty that surrounds me. Reaching presence, grounding, and resilience, I feel inspiration rise as a peaceful warmth in my chest and begin shooting multi-exposure photographs, overlaying different scenes of my surroundings on the same film negative in an intuitive way.
I surrender to the flow while simultaneously making quick, precise adjustments to the camera, balancing instinct with awareness.

This interplay of freedom and control—subconscious and conscious—takes years to master yet allows me to honor the vision unfolding before me. During film development, mysterious dimensions emerge: some elements vanish while others gain unexpected prominence. I curate the negatives, select frames to be scanned, refine them, and print with archival pigments on textured Hahnemühle paper. The slowness of this process resists instant gratification, rewarding patience, presence, and trust.

The results are photographs that serve as intimate maps of unsettledness, longing, and the fragile serenity occasionally found in the process of healing. They appear as psychological landscapes—liminal spaces where the ordinary dissolves into layers of imagination, memory, and emotion. Much like perception itself, these images weave together fragments that, over time, become the surreal constructs we call memory.

Through my work, I explore hidden beauty and fleeting feelings, turning daydreaming into a spiritual act of slowing down, healing, and being present in what I now recognize as our true home: Planet Earth.

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