Anastasia Pelias was born in 1959 in New Orleans, Louisiana to a Greek immigrant mother and a first-generation Greek-American father. Pelias is an interdisciplinary artist whose studio practice involves oil paintings on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, sound, scent, video and site-specific and site-responsive installations. Her work examines personal history, familial relationships and human ritual. She unapologetically embraces subjects of love, sex, death, destiny, and the human experience – in particular the female experience. The dual cultural identity of both her native and ancestral roots in New Orleans and Skopelos, Greece profoundly inform her work, especially Greek rituals and ideas about fate and destiny as well as the rich pageantry of the Afro-Caribbean culture in New Orleans. Pelias is interested in deep ancestral connections that are ever-present and that resonate even if they are not always understood.  Pelias received her BFA from the Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1981 and her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1996. Her work has been featured in notable exhibitions throughout the United States including The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in Southern Abstraction at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2018, and Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana at Newcomb Art Museum in 2019 which travelled to the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2020. In 2018, she was commissioned by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas to make a site-specific sculpture and land painting installation. Pelias was an artist in residence at The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, GA (2018), Skopelos Foundation for the Arts, Greece (2019), and the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans, LA (2020). She presented solo exhibitions (2017/2019) at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, where she has an upcoming solo exhibition (2021). Recent museum acquisitions include the McNay Art Museum and Newcomb Art Museum. Her work appears in the permanent collections at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama, Newcomb Art Museum, the McNay Art Museum, and in private and public collections worldwide. Pelias is a featured artist in the upcoming Prospect.5 Triennial 2021-22, where she is creating an immersive multi-media site-specific installation. Her project is being funded by the Mellon Foundation.