Daina Higgins

Daina Higgins is a multi-media painter whose studio work is informed by her background as a graffiti artist. She paints in oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and spray paint. In 2025 her gallery, Contemporary Art Matters, released a catalog entitled "Growing Up Graffiti", with an essay by Jonathan Stevenson. Her work has been exhibited nationally in New York, Columbus, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. She has been featured in sixteen solo exhibitions since 2005. In the fall of 2023 she mounted a solo exhibition at the SUNY Westchester Community College Art Gallery. In 2021 she mounted a solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Matters in Columbus, Ohio. Recent group exhibitions include Kentler International Drawing Space (Brooklyn, NY), Thomas VanDyke Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Cerulean Arts Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and the Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA).

She has been featured in various publications including Two Coats of Paint, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtNews, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Village Voice. In 2006 Roberta Smith reviewed her exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, ending her review with “[she]…creates a poetic awareness of the passage of light, moving through the world, bouncing off things and making visual experience fleetingly possible.” That same year, her graffiti art was featured in Nicholas Ganz’ book Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents.

Higgins has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, three grants from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, The FST Studio Projects Fund Grant, The Artist’s Fellowship Grant, and the Silas H. Rhodes Merit Scholarship to attend The School of Visual Arts, where she earned her BFA in 2001.

Her work is in the public collections of the Columbus Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where it is on permanent view. She is a member of the Long Island City Studio collective in Queens, NY. She is represented by Contemporary Art Matters in Columbus, Ohio.

Higgins received her MFA from Queens College, City University of New York in 2009.