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

I am drawn to the quiet magic of daydreaming – a space where conscious intention and subconscious whispers entwine, creating landscapes that exist beyond the tangible.

My camera is the tool of exploration and creation that allows me to shoot on film and create evocative analog photographs – often multilayered -, using experimental techniques such as multiple exposures.

Through my photography, I explore physical yet psychological landscapes, capturing the interplay between the real and the ethereal. I start by walking in the space and opening all my senses to infuse myself with the beauty that surrounds me, until I start feeling inspiration as a peaceful warmth in my chest.

In an intuitive way, I start shooting multi-exposure photographs where different scenes of my surroundings are overlaid on the same film negative, blurring the boundaries between moments, thoughts, and places, much like how daydreams collapse time and space into vivid, overlapping fragments.

It’s a tricky process that took years to master, where both logic and intuition come together.

On one hand, I surrender to inspiration, letting my emotions and instincts guide me as I connect deeply with the scene. On the other hand, I remain fully aware, quickly and carefully calculating and adjusting the camera settings, while avoiding being carried away by rational thinking.

This delicate interplay between freedom and control (subconscious and conscious) allows me to honor the vision unfolding before me, creating work that feels both spontaneous and intentional.

During the development process, these exposures create a mysterious new dimension where some elements disappear while others gain visibility. By looking at the small film through a lightbox, I curate the frames to be scanned and enlarged, edit the image for printing with archival pigments on textured archival Hahnemuhle papers. It’s a long process that favors patience before instant gratification.

My photography explores psychological landscapes, blending reality and the ethereal, inviting the viewer into a liminal world where the ordinary dissolves into layers of imagination, memory, and emotion. These layers are very much like our layers of perception which our mind selects and merges to create our memories, which, at the end of the day, are just surreal constructs.

Through my camera, I explore hidden beauty and fleeting feelings, turning daydreaming into a spiritual act of slowing down and being present. I welcome you to wander through my art—unhurried and open—to connect with the beauty that emerges when we let go.

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