About Me: Giselle Lebedenko

A LITTLE WARNING 

This is not a short About Me page! I made it long on purpose because I wanted to tell the whole story, in my own words, and leave nothing out. Over the years, I’ve had students from all over the world reach out to learn more about my life and how I became an artist, sometimes even wanting to make me the subject of their research projects, which I think is the sweetest, coolest thing ever. I wanted to make a little home for all of that information, somewhere anyone who’s curious can come and get to know me, my work, and the story behind it all. So whether you’re here for a school project, a little inspiration, or simply because you want to know more about the person behind the paintings, I’m so happy you’re here!!!!

I’m a painter, costume designer, and lifelong theatre lover. I make paintings, costumes, and a lot of other things, but more than anything, I love storytelling. I love creating characters, building worlds, and getting completely absorbed in an idea until I understand every little part of it.

Right now, I’m living in Oakland, California, surrounded by nature, friends, unfinished projects, and about a million ideas for things I want to make next. I’m starting a print club, getting deeper into theatre and painting, and finally giving myself more space to experiment.

It’s a very exciting place to be, especially because I never really had a plan for any of this.

I didn’t grow up thinking I would become a full-time artist. For a long time, I didn’t even think being an artist was a realistic career for me. Somehow, though, one thing kept leading to another, and I kept following whatever I was most excited about.

So this is how I got here.

Before I knew I could be an artist

I grew up in the Bay Area in California and was a very, very active kid. I was a huge theatre kid, danced, did gymnastics, played all kinds of sports, and was constantly making things. I loved art projects, cutting up paper, making things out of duct tape—basically anything where I could use my hands and turn some random materials into something new.

But I don't think I really understood how important making things was to me until high school.

At some point I became completely obsessed with art. I would basically ghost all my friends during breaks and disappear into the art classroom. I was always working on something. Sometimes I would make multiple pieces for a single assignment because I was having so much fun and didn't want to stop.

Making art made me incredibly happy. It gave me this feeling of peace that I didn't really get anywhere else, and I loved watching myself improve. There was something so satisfying about realizing that I could make something I genuinely loved looking at. I loved being able to build my own world and kind of shut the real world out? not completely, but it did become as escape.

But even then, I never thought, Maybe I can be an artist.

Nobody in my family had done that. I didn't have anyone around me who made being a professional artist feel like a normal, realistic career. So even though I loved art more than almost anything, I assumed I would eventually have to find a “real” career.

Fashion, sewing, and Paris

During my junior year of high school, COVID happened, and I became obsessed with fashion design and sewing.

I had always loved drawing clothes and designing outfits, and eventually I thought, Why am I only drawing these? I should learn how to actually make them.

Because high school was online, I found a community college nearby that had a fashion program. Every night I would put on a mask and go there to learn pattern making, draping, and sewing. I practiced constantly and basically forced myself to figure things out.

I loved fashion design, and because it seemed like there were actual careers in fashion, it felt like a practical direction for me.

So after high school, I moved to Paris to study at ESMOD.

Paris itself was amazing. I made wonderful friends and memories, and part of me would have loved to stay there. But pretty quickly I realized the school was completely wrong for me.

I felt creatively trapped. I wanted to make my own decisions, and I didn't always agree with the creative direction I was being given. There were professors giving me advice about my work that I simply didn't connect with. I remember thinking that some of the work they were showing me was boring or ugly, and I couldn't understand why I was supposed to make my work more like that.

Eventually I realized something much bigger:

I was never going to be happy working under someone else's creative vision.

I needed to be in charge of my own.

I also realized that I didn't actually like the fashion industry very much.

That was a difficult realization because I had gone all the way to Paris to study fashion. I had made this huge decision about my future, and now I was realizing that I didn't want the future I had imagined.

I moved home.

At the time, it felt like I had failed. I had left my friends, left Paris, and gone back to California. I was lost and honestly pretty depressed.

But looking back, it was soooooooooo the right decision for me.

Coming home and accidentally finding theatre

When I came back, I decided I would become a business major and eventually open a vintage store in San Francisco.

I went to the same community college that I took classes at in high school.

The business major lasted about a week lol.

I realized I didn't want to manage a store, and I didn't even really like retail. So I started taking random art and sewing classes again, still with absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life.

Then Claire Alexander messaged me on Instagram.

Claire had actually known me since I was eight years old because she had choreographed several musicals I had been in as a kid. She had followed me on Instagram for a while and knew that I was back in the Bay Area and could sew.

She was about to direct Shrek the Musical at a local high school and asked if I would costume design it.

I had nothing else going on, and the idea sounded fun. I was excited to experience theatre from a completely different angle, so I said yes.

And then I completely threw myself into it.

I think I made over 100 costumes in about two months.

It was intense, but I loved the creative freedom. I got to create this completely ridiculous world of characters and make what I still think was the craziest Shrek costume ever.

Soon afterward I was asked to costume design Fiddler on the Roof at another local community theatre.

At the same time, I was painting constantly and posting everything I was doing online.

I didn't realize it yet, but these things were all beginning to connect.

When social media stopped being “just social media”

Technically, I've been posting my life online since middle school. Social media had always been a big part of my life, but originally it was mostly just a place to share things with my friends.

That changed after I came home from Paris.

I was lonely, confused about what I was doing with my life, making art, working on theatre, trying different things, and spending a lot of time online. I started seeing other artists sharing their work and their stories, and I became SOO inspired.

I remember thinking, Maybe I can do that too.

Maybe I could share what I was making. Maybe I could find people who liked the same things I did. Maybe I could inspire someone else.

And, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that social media could potentially open doors.

It absolutely did.

My early content wasn't actually that different from what I make now. I shared my creations and my process. I made silly videos of myself. I danced in nature. I participated in fashion trends. I tried a million different formats.

But I never wanted my social media to feel overly professional.

I wanted it to feel like me.

One of my first huge moments happened when I participated in a trend where people showed a bunch of outfits in one video. My caption was:

“this trend but I made all of these outfits and wear them out in public with zero shame”

The video blew up.

Suddenly thousands of people were following me.

That was the first time I had one of those wait… WHAT? moments.

People were actually watching.

So I made more.

I would combine my different interests in ridiculous ways. I made videos where my outfits matched my paintings. I danced while holding my paintings. I shared whatever I was making.

I've always been like that. I don't really separate the different things I do. Painting, fashion, theatre, costumes, being on camera—they all exist together.

And eventually, social media became one of the biggest reasons I was able to become a full-time artist.
The first painting I sold

One of the first pieces that really changed things for me was a fabric landscape.

Someone saw a video of it and wanted to buy it.

I sold it for around $600.

I was completely stressed about shipping it because I had never shipped a painting before. I had to figure everything out myself.

Now I've shipped paintings all over the world.

That first sale turned into more commissions surprisingly quickly. Most were under $1,000, and pretty soon I was doing a few commissions every month with a short waiting list. 90% of these commissions were fabric landscapes. These pieces popped offfff for me and I made so so many!

For a while, I was doing all of this from my childhood bedroom.

Then I realized I needed my own space.

I wanted the freedom to experiment without feeling like I was being controlled by my parents. I wanted to be able to make a mess. I wanted to take myself more seriously and feel more responsible and professional. Mostly, I just wanted room to expand in every direction.

So I went searching for a private studio.
My First Studio

I found a large warehouse in downtown San Jose with rentable artist studios. Mine had a huge window and cost $760 a month, which at the time felt completely reasonable because I was making enough to cover it.

I had it for about nine months.

I covered the walls with my art. I thrifted furniture, lamps, dolls, and basically anything that made the room feel like me. There was even a little sink and kitchen area. I had tons of tea and mugs and a mini fridge.

I wanted to make the space so comfortable that I would actually be excited to spend entire days there.

And it worked.

Maybe a little too well.

That studio made me even more of a workaholic because making art felt better than ever. I wanted to be there constantly.

One of my favorite parts, though, was being able to invite friends over.

Even when I didn't have a huge social life, I loved having people come into this little creative oasis. I always had extra supplies, so anyone who came over could literally just make art with me.

We would paint next to each other, talk, eat, hang out, and eventually I'd go back to working.

It didn't happen constantly, but those were some of my favorite memories from that period.

The studio also became one of the most experimental periods of my career.

I was still making fabric landscapes, but I started pushing myself beyond them. I painted more portraits. I experimented with different materials.

And eventually, I accidentally invented the dancing paintings.
The Dancing Paintings

The dancing paintings weren't planned at all.

I just wanted to use fabric in a new way.

I had always loved fashion design, and I loved painting people, so combining those two things felt natural. I started making these life-size paintings of women with crazy hair and expressive faces, with real fabric hanging off the canvas as part of their clothing.

Then one day I was doing an art reveal on social media.

I was standing behind the painting, like I always did, and when I turned it around, my legs were poking out from behind it.

I saw the illusion through the flipped camera and freaked out.

It looked like the woman in the painting was actually dancing.

I hadn't planned that.

I had just accidentally discovered something.

People immediately understood it and loved it.

The dancing paintings became a huge part of my work. They were almost performance art because the painting only became fully alive when I physically stood behind it.

I loved them because they combined so many things I already loved: painting people, making clothing, performance, humor, and doing something that felt completely different from a normal painting.
New York

Eventually I went to New York for a short trip to visit my sister.

While I was there, I had dinner with two theatre friends. One of them said he was going on Broadway and looking for an apartment and roommates.

My immediate thought was:

Shit. I wanna move in.

So I went home, packed up my entire studio in less than two months, and moved to New York.

I asked my boyfriend, Adrik, if he wanted to come with me. He was down.

We ended up living in a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates, Isabella and Chris, whom I had met through TikTok.

Four creatives in a tiny apartment became our shared studio.

It was honestly miserable in a lot of ways.

The winter was brutal. Our living room didn't even have windows. I missed California constantly—the sun, nature, having a car, having space.

But there were also things about New York that were amazing.

For the first time, I was surrounded by artists all the time. I met so many creative people. I was constantly seeing new work and being exposed to new ideas.

And I wasn't lonely anymore.

That mattered enormously to me.

I also became completely financially independent through my art.

That was the first time I truly felt like, Holy shit. I'm actually doing this.

Before New York, I had my studio, but I still ate at home and slept at home. I wasn't completely financially independent.

In New York, I was paying for my own life.

And somehow, throughout that entire year, there was never a moment when I didn't have work.

That doesn't mean I wasn't stressed.

Being a full-time artist is terrifying sometimes because you never know exactly how much money you're going to make next month. There was a lot of hoping, manifesting, and wondering whether the next project would come.

I feel incredibly lucky that the right projects kept appearing at exactly the right time.

That year made me much more responsible. I learned how to manage money, how to run more of a business, and how to make my art career actually support my life.

I also started selling prints.

I found a local print shop that made beautiful prints for me and started doing print drops through Instagram. Some were successful, some were just okay.

The first one was by far the most successful.

I think part of the reason was simply that I had never done it before. It felt new and exciting, and people who had been following me could suddenly own a piece of my art for $40.

It was an accessible way for people to support me.

And I learned a lot from it.

More experimenting…(very important)

New York was also where my work became much stranger.

Now that I had an online presence which is where people were also commissioning me.. I felt a ton of pressure to make art that people liked and wanted to buy. This mindset kind of started giving me burnout because I wasn't thinking as much about what current giselle wanted to be making just for fun. I made the decisions to create some weird shit that i just really wanted to make and i decided i would post whatever i made knowing people may not like it. I kinda chose to just not care and trust that the right people would stick around. I started making my pube pieces.

They're paintings of naked women with their bodies posed in exaggerated ways, and I hand-sew incredibly long hair extensions directly into the canvas so the hair literally grows out of the painting.

You can brush it.

You can braid it.

It's completely ridiculous and I love them:)

I'd never worked with hair before, so even though the subject matter was weird, it was also a serious technical experiment. I had to figure out how to physically attach all this hair to a painting so it could actually exist outside of the canvas.

These pieces have been commissioned, people love them, and they also get censored by Instagram constantly.

That has been one of the most frustrating parts of my career because Instagram is my main platform for sharing my work, and the pieces aren't really intended to be explicit. The figures have a very cartoonish quality rather than trying to look completely realistic.

Still, the platform doesn't always see the distinction.

When I started making stranger work, I gained a lot of new followers.

I also lost a ton of old ones.

And honestly?

I wasn't bothered.

It actually felt good.

I felt like I was growing.

The people who were coming in were more aligned with where my work was going. More artists started following me. More theatre people found me. And a surprising number of art students started reaching out because they wanted to do school projects about me.

They asked about everything—my process, my career, social media, my inspirations, my future goals.

That is actually one of the reasons I wanted to make this page.

I've realized that people aren't only interested in individual paintings. They want to understand how all of this happened.

The strange reality of being online

Social media has been one of the most exciting and useful things in my career.

It has also been completely overwhelming and surreal.

There was a period where I had a lot of anxiety about being watched. Thousands—or eventually many more—of strangers could form an entire interpretation of me based on a handful of videos.

And the weird thing is that social media actually shows so little of who I am.

When I'm with my friends, there is an enormous amount of my personality that will never exist online.

Online, people see the paintings. They see the costumes. They see the weird videos. They see pieces of my personality.

But they don't necessarily see the person who will spend hours asking a friend questions because I genuinely want to understand them.

They don't see how intensely I care about my friendships.

They don't see how much I push the people I love to believe in themselves.

So social media has always been this strange balance for me.

It has given me opportunities I never could have imagined.

It helped me find an audience.

It brought me commissions.

It made becoming a full-time artist possible.

It connected me with artists, theatre people, students, friends, and people all over the world.

But it can also feel bizarre knowing that people can think they know you when they only know one tiny piece of you.

I've gotten much better at accepting that.

I also don't want to make my social media into some perfectly polished version of myself.

I want it to feel real.

The person behind the work

I think one of the biggest things I've learned about myself as I've gotten older is how deeply I care about understanding things.

If I love a musical, I don't just want to know the plot.

I want to understand every character.

I want to know why they behave the way they do, what they're feeling, what they're hiding, what their clothes should communicate, what the symbolism could be, and what could make the story even more interesting.

I do this with people too.

I love understanding my friends.

I'm constantly asking questions, and apparently my friends think I ask unusually interesting ones. I don't really know where this curiosity came from—it has just gotten stronger as I've gotten older.

And I think that comes from something much more personal.

Growing up, I had some really bad friendships. For a long time I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere.

There were periods when I genuinely hated who I was, how I was acting, and how I was being treated.

Eventually I realized that I had worth.

I realized what kind of person I could become and what kind of friend I wanted to be.

So I started working hard to cut negativity out of my life and of course art simultaneously took over during this transition.

I became more selective about my community—not because I think I'm better than anyone, but because I want the people around me to feel safe, healthy, loving, and supportive.

And now I absolutely love my friends.

My favorite people are people who aren't afraid to be themselves.

I love the real, beautiful connection.

I'm actually really proud of the person I've become outside of my career.

Why I make art

I think the easiest answer is that I just fucking love painting.

I love spreading goupy paint across a canvas.

I love color.

I love possibility.

I love starting with something blank and having absolutely no idea what it will become.

There is something incredible about that feeling.

Usually I start with something broad. Maybe I have a character, an idea, a feeling, a visual, or a story in my head.

But the painting evolves as I work.

There isn't a perfect formula.

And I don't want there to be.

My favorite thing about my work is storytelling.

I want something to be happening.

I want there to be a character or a relationship or some ridiculous little detail that makes you wonder what happened five minutes before the scene you're looking at.

I love huge paintings filled with characters and expressions and chaos. I love paintings that almost feel like an I Spy page because there are so many things happening.

I also love making people laugh.

I want my work to show something beyond just beauty.

Beautiful things are obviously part of who I am too, but I'm also naturally outgoing, weird, funny, expressive, and a little ridiculous.

I think everyone is like that when they're completely comfortable and real.

I like making art that normalizes that side of people.

I want someone to laugh.

I want someone to be confused.

Sometimes I want someone to be a little disturbed.

Mostly, I want them to feel something.

Growing up I saw painting as a way of manifesting the life I wanted. This got me into very theatrical art because it's always centered around community. When I was feeling super down bad and lonely, I'd often start to make art about friends dancing together or people laughing. Art is hard to explain but just know that I do see painting as a form of manifestation and I love to paint about positive things and spread positivity to others and within myself.

Costume Design and Theatre

I know I'm good at costume design. I “ know” this because I just got absolutely ham with it and work super hard and get very extra and to me that's what good looks like is just deep, hard intentional care.

I love coming up with the vision. I love figuring out what a character should look like and how their clothing can tell their story.

What I don't love is physically sewing 100 costumes in two months.

The three major shows I costume designed (shrek, fiddler on the roof, and the addams family) were incredibly stressful. I would stay up late every night trying to make everything as good as possible, and because I was responsible for so much of the actual sewing and construction, the pay ended up being almost laughably low—at one point I calculated that I was making around $1 an hour.

So I don't think traditional costume design is necessarily the life I want.

But I absolutely love the art of costume design.

About a year and a half ago, I started a video series where every video begins:

“This is how I would costume design…”

Then I choose a musical and completely dive into it.

I spend weeks researching. I think about every character. I think about symbolism, personality, relationships, visual storytelling, and how I could create something that hasn't been done before.

Theatre is the perfect place for my brain because theatre is already extra.

The costumes can be insane.

The characters can be insane.

The stories can be insane.

I get to take all of that and build a visual world around it.

And that's where my current project came from.

The GISBILL

The GISBILL  project I'm creating now is probably the best combination of everything I've ever done.

Every month, I'm locking in on one show, diving into it, designing the costumes, creating new ideas, and even making a painting about it.

I'll paint “GISBILL” big and bold across the top, and each one becomes my own visual interpretation of a different show.

It combines theatre.

It combines costume design.

It combines storytelling.

It lets me research musicals obsessively.

It lets me write.

It lets me dream it literally combines everything i love.

What comes next?????

Right now, I'm in Oakland, and I feel more peaceful than I have in a long time.

I have windows.

I have nature.

I have nice weather.

I have space.

I have my friends nearby.

And I have a million projects I want to start.

I'm excited to experiment more and maybe take on fewer commissions so I can give myself time to make things that I wouldn't necessarily have time to make otherwise.

One thing I really want to do is get into ceramics.

I want to turn my garage into a ceramics studio and make my own tile sets. I want to renovate my kitchen and bathroom with tiles I've made myself. I want to make completely insane mosaics out of my own handmade pieces.

And eventually, I want to make something enormous.

I don't even know what the subject would be yet.

I just know I want to make a huge series of huge paintings that tell insane stories.

That's probably the best description of where I am right now.

I don't know exactly what's next.

And I actually really like that.

I've never had a perfect formula.

My career happened because one thing kept leading to another. A painting led to a commission. A commission led to a studio. A studio led to experimentation. Experimentation led to dancing paintings. Theatre led to costume design. Social media connected all of it. New York taught me how to build a life around my art. And now Oakland has given me the space to slow down, experiment, and see what happens next.

I feel incredibly lucky.

But I also know how hard I've worked for this.

If there's one thing I would tell the younger artists, theatre kids, and creative people who follow me, it's this:

If you're fortunate enough to be able to follow your dreams, you HAVE to.

If you love something, it is so worth working so, so hard for it.

It isn't always easy.

It can be scary and financially unpredictable and confusing and sometimes completely overwhelming.

But there is something so beautiful about building a life around something you genuinely love.

I'm still building mine.

And I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to make next.