Gianna Paniagua

Gianna Paniagua was born in New York City in 1991. At the age of 14 months, she was diag- nosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and became the recipient of a heart transplant at Babies & Children’s Hospital of New York. Much of her time growing up was split between
the cities of Manhattan and Miami. Gianna received her BA from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2013. Her papercutting sculptures have created a following in the Pittsburgh art scene and has exhibited at Wood Street Gallery, The Westmoreland Museum of Art, and 707 Gallery. Her initial years post graduation were spent working bi-coastally in Pittsburgh and San Francisco as she collaborated with companies in the Bay such as SF MOMA, Square, and the Kala Institute for Printmaking. In 2014, she received the Grand Prize award for the VSA Emerging Young Artist Program in association with The Kennedy Center which honored artists with disabilities. Thanks to her award, she was given the opportunity to exhibit in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and was part of a nationally touring exhibition throughout 2015. Because of the deep emotional connections the work has with her health experiences, Gianna continues to use art as a way to involve herself in the medical community. She was invited to lecture and teach at the Cleveland Clinic, partnered with Genentech in San Francisco to create art revolving around transplantation, and hosts classes for her practice of Meditative Papercutting for art students as well as chronic illness patients. In 2018 she completed her studies towards an MFA in Visual Arts as a graduate student of sculpture at California College of the Arts. In 2019 she enrolled as a postbac in the premed program at Columbia University in Manhattan with the intention to have a career in medicine. In 2021 she received a second heart transplant from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, where she relocated to specifically for her surgery. She strives to create resources that are specifically aimed towards young adult patients and research better treatments for immunosuppressant nonadherance in those patients. What began as a way to tell her story when she could not physically make artwork due to heart failure is now a major part of her practice: making comics and joining the Graphic Medicine Community. Now, she looks for ways Narrative and Graphic Medicine can be useful for medical professionals, med students, and patients.

Gianna currently works on all things paper in Nashville and New York City.

Click here to read an article about my work on Young Millennial Adult