Ana Popescu is a Romanian-American multidisciplinary artist based in Providence, Rhode Island, working sculpturally with a focus on ceramics. She earned her BFA from Pratt Institute before co-founding an immersive event company in New York City, where she created site-specific installations and curated performance programs under the moniker A.Pop. She later directed large-scale branded productions across the U.S. for major advertising agencies.

In 2022, Popescu was awarded the Friends of Arrowmont and Trudy and Henry Gillette Sculpture Scholarships at the Art Students League of New York. She completed a residency at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in 2023, received an Anderson Ranch Scholarship in 2024, and earned her MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025, supported by the RISD Fellowship, Windgate Foundation Scholarship, and Graduate Ceramic Award..

She has exhibited in over two dozen shows across New York City, Bucharest, and Providence. In 2026, she will be Artist-in-Residence at St. Andrew’s School in Barrington, RI, and will begin teaching ceramics at The Steel Yard in Providence.

My work explores the tensions and contradictions that shape identity, memory, and perception. As an immigrant from communist-era Romania raised in the ornamented sprawl of suburban Florida, I exist between worlds—between austerity and excess, mythology and fact, survival and comfort. This in-betweenness is both a site of inquiry and a source of creation.

I draw from historical forms—monuments, ruins, and decorative motifs—not to replicate them, but to question the ideologies they carry. Ornament becomes a tool for reflection: a language of illusion, power, and embedded narrative. By deconstructing these maximalist details, I reveal the scaffolding behind the spectacle and the frameworks that shape how we remember, value, and mythologize.

My sculptures are layered accumulations of fragments, found materials, ceramics, and cast-off objects already charged with meaning. Through an intuitive process of collecting and embedding, these elements form a broader system of remembrance.

What began as an instinctive impulse to hold onto past spaces crystallized into a way of thinking. I refer to my work as “time capsules”: vessels for memory and transformation, containers of personal history reframed through making.

My process is guided by material response and conceptual intent. As the work evolves, it absorbs traces of my past, questions, and unconscious. Each piece becomes a sealed diary—layered with contradiction, imprinted with my psyche, and offered as both artifact and mirror.