I am an artist, writer, and performer based in Rotterdam, originally from Rome, Italy. I hold a BA and MA in English Literature from Roma Tre University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago. My work has been presented internationally, including at La Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and at Kunstinstituut Melly, Varia, WORM, and Buitenplaats Brienenoord in Rotterdam. I create artworks that investigate the storytelling impulse and how emotion, behavior, and desire, especially as they relate to reproduction and survival, are shaped by political and ecological systems. My work asks how feelings and the narratives we build around them emerge through culture, history, and environment. I am interested in how form shapes experience, and in how the same material transforms as it moves between performance, film, and writing. I often rework pieces across these forms to understand the particular logic and sensory force of each medium. My current research focuses on the experience of living inside social structures and physical infrastructures that keep us numb, suspended, or caught in repetition, and on what it takes to move toward other ways of relating. Zen philosophy and practice inform how I work with attention, behavioral patterns, and improvisation. I'm particularly interested in altered states of consciousness as spaces where new forms of relationship and imagination can emerge. Working across writing, sound, video, and performance, I think of my performances as temporary shared emotional worlds: collaborative and often improvised, using humor, rhythm, and repetition to unsettle habitual ways of sensing and understanding. For me, language stays alive in the act of voicing what is overlooked or repressed, whether through words, sound, rhythm, moving image, or melody. I want meaning to be felt in the body, and I want the mind to confront what it usually works to contain.
Light Observatory #7 - Presentation
A presentation of works in progress developed during our sailboat residency in 2025
Impossible Love Songs
Impossible Love Songs - Roodkapje - June 6th 2026 - Impossible Love Songs was a 70-minute largely improvised performance by Valentina Vella and Luke {LISA} Deane based on Valentina's texts about heartbreak, spanning personal romantic disappointments and cosmic and ecological anxiety.
WATERWAKE
WATERWAKE at Buitenplaats Brienenoord - April 2026 - Site-specific performance that included a performative water-themed dinner, “a swamp in a bowl,” developed in collaboration with Swamp, a community kitchen initiative led by Sarah Blake. I served audience members and invited them to “receive wisdom from the bowl” through a hydromancy-inspired ritual, generating audience responses that I later incorporated into an improvised song during the approximately two-hour performance.
Water of Love - Worm Version
Water of Love
performance with the participation of Luke Deane, Mitsitron and Stephen Kerr
Reading during The Rehearsal event
A Conversation on Love
In this episode we tried to tackle a sticky topic: love! We rambled a lot, from romantic love to politics, from bad exes to spirituality and art. There will definitely be a Part Two! Some of the people we mentioned/songs we listened to: Byung-Chul Hang, John O'Donohue, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Bini Adamczak, Vacation from Love (Michelle Gurevich), Slurf Song (Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones).
Bad at Love - Phase One of "School of Love and Chaos" (old title: Bad Investments)
The project was an intimate exploration of my personal struggles with love and relationships, but it also aimed to address questions about the commodification of love and its political repercussions. It culminated in a performance at Paviljoen-aan-het-Water, with Luke Deane as co-performer and Amy Gowan as wrangler. It was largely improvised: we conceived it as an “open book/open album,” an opening up the artistic process since its early stages.
Zo doe je dat
performance and interview during an event about the Praktijk Bijdrage
Performance at Party Party - DAI Fundraiser for non-EU students
Performance of some Netherworld pieces during the DAI fundraiser
Netherworld at an other world
The first full live performance of Netherworld, an album of sonic poetry about personal and planetary crises set to electronic music. Weaving together the literary and the utterly mundane, it is brutally funny and often danceable.
performance at Vrooom
performance of sound pieces from A Ride West and Netherworld
ART IS DEAD - LONG LIVE ART notes towards a post-capitalist art practice (RADIO SHOW)
The current art system is broken. It creates artificial scarcity, exhaustion, anxiety, needless competition. How do we make good art while taking care of ourselves and each other? How do we set the old model on fire and build something new? Valentina doesn't have the answers (yet?) but she will be exploring these questions with the help of many books and friends in her (monthly) radio show. There will also be sounds/music!
LIVE: Kunstinstituut Melly and Amarte Foundation in Concert
performance of some Netherworld pieces during Museum Night in response to Lisa Tan's installation.
Rehearsing Change | Fostering a culture of radical self-care
In a complex, profoundly unequal and ecologically imperiled world, most of us don't feel at ease. In this workshop I guided participants through somatic exercises based on the Polyvagal Theory and my own embodied artistic practice that gave them a taste of what is possible when we work with and not against the needs of the body and the nervous system.
Netherworld - album launch
The launch event of the longer and revised version of my sound album Netherworld. Supported by Dream and Deed Foundation.
Netherworld
An installation comprising photos and a sound album. Netherworld is composed of spoken word recordings and sound pieces about failure, depression, involuntary nomadism and the pathologizing of perfectly normal emotional responses to the social and ecological crises we are facing. It achieves epic levels of mundanity and it will make you feel uncomfortable about the state of the world but your body will want to dance to it.
Coming Suddenly, Passing Strangely
I presented a piece from my upcoming sound album Netherworld.
Urbi et Orbi
my piece Urbi et Orbi was broadcasted during Rava Vavàra, a radio show by Eva Macali
I Pidocchi
poetry reading during the festival Women Out of Joint
Cognitive Capitalism, an Open Letter to the Invisible Committee
exhibition of texts and artworks made during the Saas-Fee 2018 Summer Institute of Art | Berlin
A Ride West (hybrid memoir)
I worked on a hybrid memoir based on A Ride West
Desire(d)
performance event during which I presented Dirge Circuit
Dark Matter
practices. In 2015 I led creative workshops during the micro-residency program Dark Matter, which I developed with Pamala Bishop and Jay Murphy in New Orleans. We embraced the principles outlined by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in Thought in the Act (which explores the intimate, embodied connections between thinking and creative practice). I worked with thirty American artists during three days of experimentation, exhibition, play and rest.
You Are Not Your - performance by Caleb Yono
I performed in a collaborative piece by Caleb Yono
The Imaginary Center of Perception
I participated as performer and collaborator in a performance by Kirsten Leenars about police violence
Notes on Empty Chairs (1, 2, 3) - performances by Kirsten Leenaars
I participated as performer and collaborator in a performance by Kirsten Leenars during the Doris Salcedo exhibition.
A Ride West Live
A theatrical performance based on the film A Ride West written and performed by Valentina Vella; featuring a live band (Nathan Paulus, Sharon Hoyer and Josh Miller from the I Ching Quartet and Daniel Schneider from The Singleman Affair) and live video editing and processing by Michael LaHood. Sound design by Alex Drosen. Lighting by Chelsey Shilling.
A Ride West
An experimental film on love, fear, desire and the violent, masculine American myths of conquest and self-reliance. The projected started as a durational performance (riding a horse across America in the summer 2013) and culminated in a video installation presented at The Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago in May 2014.