Rafiana is a multidisciplinary artist of Puerto Rican and American descent from Atlanta, producing works in the performing arts, music, film, and painting.
They have shared the stages with Grammy-nominated performers as well as self-professed “non-performers.” Their work focuses on improvisation and the many ways in which that practice collides with elements of form. After graduating from Georgia State University where they explored several elements of poetic language, their work became largely based in an abstraction of poetry as it related to the body, the physical world, movement and dance, and music. Often, their works are based in dreamlike poetry. The most recent live works they have produced have been large-scale experimental theater pieces in which a live orchestra has been present scoring movements and actions that are loosely choreographed with an emphasis on the performer improvising through ‘moods’ created by the various elements in each scene.
Their work has since begun to move into the realms of clowning as an abstraction and interruption to space with respect to live performance and bizarre theater. Rafiana designs many of the aesthetic elements of their theater world which involves creating costumes, props, object curation, painting, sound design, and lighting. The more recent themes of their work have been rooted in thoughts about exploitation of the self, exploring variations on the concept of clowning and experiments with abstraction of samples to environments and material to be played on the midi guitar.