Jaina Cipriano

At 17 time stops. You have forever briefly in your grasp. You remember, don’t you? Anything was possible and nothing mattered. The future is a beautiful dream, never approaching.

Trouble has no meaning and boundaries are meant to be pushed. To learn when to stop, you have to go too far. And you are a lucky one if you don’t write your future on an unfortunate incident.

This time in my life has been deeply etched in my memory andI can’t let it go. It haunts me. AndI think I somehow always knew it would. The photographs are visual journals, I kept a meticulous record of this time. It was the only way to cope with the change I knew was coming.

These photographs are the last of time before the internet became a place. We wandered aimless as kids. Our flip phones, always dying and being charged on the go, gave us a way to connect-“where u at?” and that was it. Life was outside the phone.

Now phones are an extension of ourselves. When the phone and the camera fused with smartphones photographs stopped being memories and started becoming content. Our photos weren’t personal documents anymore, they were public.

When the camera turns on people now there is a new awareness-where will that photo go? Who will see it? And what will they think of me? I see a freedom in these images that is of that age, yes, but that is also of the time. We were living on the cusp of change, the very last of a free world.

Artist Bio

Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work delves into the emotional complexities of religious and romantic entrapment. Through her immersive worlds, she invites viewers to reconnect with their neglected inner child, using explosive colors, elements of elevated play, and a dynamic interplay of light and dark to evoke deep, often unspoken emotions.

As a filmmaker, Jaina writes and directs award-winning short films that navigate the challenging path of healing. Her second short film,Trauma Bond, a dreamy coming-of-age thriller that explores the allure of quick fixes for deep wounds, won the grand prize at the Lonely Seal International Film Festival.

Jaina’s photographic works are fabricated by hand in her Lowell studio. Working with Jaina is often described as cathartic and playful. She studied at the New England School of Photography and TheGriffin Museum. She has shown at Leica Gallery Boston, The Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston University and Kingston Gallery. Her work has been published over 200 times and selected for the top 200 of Critical Mass 2024.

Jaina is also the owner of the Arlington International Film Festival and the founder of Finding BrightStudios, an experiential design company based in Lowell, MA. She has collaborated with GRRLHAUS, Boston Art Review, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and was a Boston Fellow for the MassArt Creative Business Incubator. Jaina was a finalist in E for All Merrimack Valley in 2022and a 2025 recipient of New England Foundation for the Arts Public Learning Fund.