Agata Surma is a Polish-American interdisciplinary artist and writer working across painting, sculpture, movement, and text. She was born in Poland during the final years of the communist era and grew up surrounded by art through her father and grandmother. Her grandmother, an art teacher in a village in eastern Poland, painted expressive abstractions in the 1970s reminiscent of Joan Mitchell. After her parents divorced when she was three, she lost contact with that side of the family, and the world of painting connected to her grandmother and father became distant and almost mythical.
As a teenager she joined her father in Orange County, CA, where she began formally studying painting and completed advanced courses in painting, life drawing, and mixed media under the mentorship of artist and professor A. J. Sagen. She later earned a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Cambridge. After graduating, she worked in research on natural resource governance in Africa.
In 2010 she was invited by an Indigenous storyteller from the Guna community in Panama to lead a community art project, marking her return to artistic practice. During this time she began exploring experimental dance improvisation and founded a dance collective that performed in Panama City. She spent seven years living and working in Panama, where she developed her studio practice and co-founded an independent art project supporting emerging artists.
In 2018 she participated in an artist residency in Germany that culminated in an exhibition of her work. She later moved to New York, where in 2019 she presented a solo exhibition at the Kosciuszko Foundation. Her work has also been shown at SCOPE Art Fair and Artexpo New York. A breast cancer survivor, she later created a sculptural project exploring the female body through single-breast forms, which was exhibited at AHA Fine Art in New York in the spring of 2024.
In 2025 she presented a solo exhibition of her paintings at Gracie Mansion titled On the Verge of Cosmic Encounters, where she also delivered a talk about her work and read poetry written during her recovery from cancer. She currently serves as an advisory board member of Community Engagement, a nonprofit organization based in Santa Ana, CA that supports artists and programs reimagining shared spaces through creative expression. Today, her work explores the transformation of body and consciousness through painting, sculpture, movement, and writing, exploring how inner psychological landscapes emerge from chaos into visual form.
https://agatasurma.com | Instagram @agatasurmaart
EDUCATION
2009 – Masters degree in International Development Studies, Cambridge University (UK) – Queens College
2007 – Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Sciences
University of California – Berkeley
2003 – Associate of Arts degree from Santiago Canyon
College, Orange, and Santa Ana College, Santa Ana, Orange County, California