Shanna Cox is a Los Angeles–based oil painter working in contemporary figurative and representational painting. Her current body of work occupies the threshold between the familiar and the surreal, examining the distance between the body we live in and the self we build online.

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Cox paints across a range of sizes, from small panels to canvases as large as 48 × 72 inches, in bold color and close portraiture. Figures appear suspended between autonomy and exposure and the body is treated as lived-in and surveilled at once, performed for a screen as much as inhabited in space. 

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Her current work centers on the digital echo or twin: the double that stands in for us online. What interests her is not only how that double diverges from us, but how it stays. People change; the record doesn't. We end up represented by versions of ourselves we've already outgrown, and then held to them.

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Having come of age amid rapid technological and cultural transformation, Cox uses painting as a site of tension rather than resolution. The work resists nostalgia and futurism alike, focusing instead on the instability of the present moment.  To achieve this, she uses a high resolution vs. low resolution visual language.

 

Cox is largely self-taught. She entered the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2001, spent twelve years in business, and returned to painting full time in 2024. Her work has been shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art, with Lucky Cat Gallery in Los Angeles, and with Cannibal Flower. In 2026, she was awarded second prize in America at 350, a collaboration between the City of Brea Gallery and Thinkspace Projects. She lives and works in Venice, California.