LAURA ARENA is a designer, gallery owner and artist living in the beautiful seaside neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn, New York. She has shown work in galleries in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts. She won the Spring Arts Competition at the Schoolhouse Gallery in 2008. Arena was awarded Díónýsía Residency in Iceland for summer, 2010. She will be spending time in the West Fjords with sea monsters and her toy camera.

Arena shoots with plastic cameras that feel and work much like toys and allow a sense of anticipation and excitement to be part of the process. The final images are rooted in her decisions about place, time, subject and point of view but the resulting prints always contain a degree of surprise. She just recently started to shoot with a digital camera, a Digital Harinezumi 2, a camera that produces results similar to 110 film and that has 3 visible buttons.