Bella Bishara is a mixed media artist based in Greenville, South Carolina. Originally from Egypt, she moved to the United States as a child and has lived most of her life in the South. While she has been making art for as long as she can remember, it was in middle school that she decided she wanted to pursue it as her life’s work.
Her practice explores deep questions of identity, belief, and the body, often using self-portraiture as a starting point. During her two-week residency at Azule, Bella focused on preparing for her first solo exhibition, Altar of a New Body. The series is heavily influenced by her upbringing in the Coptic Orthodox Church, using religious imagery to examine the body as a sacred vessel and a site of conflicting meanings.
The residency allowed Bella to work quickly and follow her instincts. One piece, completed in just a single day, uses color and abstraction to visualize how anxiety feels within her own body. Other works created at Azule explore dualities—like the relationship between the soul and the physical body—using contrasting materials and colors to show how these internal and external forces push against one another.
Bella also experimented with a monochromatic style to address the pressures of modern beauty standards. This work touches on themes like dieting and cosmetic procedures, setting them against traditionally “feminine” visuals to create a tension between outward appearances and internal realities.
The final piece of her residency explores the challenge of making abstract, endless ideas into something physical. For Bella, that contradiction is exactly the point: it mirrors the difficult process of taking what is inside the mind and turning it into something you can see and touch.