Event – Detail

This three-hours intensive invites participants to access and explore inner landscapes through breathwork, writing, and drawing. Rooted in the practice of Conscious Connected Breathing, this workshop integrates mind, body, and imagination. Participants will move from breath-based awareness into creative translation--turning sensations, emotions, and imagery into drawings that reflect the terrain of our interior worlds.

Maren Less is a Philadelphia-based visual artist whose acrylic paintings explore the complexity of the subconscious through symbolic imagery. Her compositions are populated with cars, trees, animals, ladders, fruits, buildings, houses, and planes—elements that converge into dynamic emotional landscapes shaped by memory, intuition, and lived experience. Drawing from places she has inhabited, dreamed about, and absorbed over time, Less creates scenes that blur the boundary between internal and external worlds. Her paintings reflect the tension between movement and stillness, chaos and serenity, longing and transformation.

Poetry plays an essential role in her practice. Each completed painting is accompanied by a poem that helps her uncover the emotional and symbolic logic embedded within the work. Through this reflective process, Less investigates the meaning of her imagery, the psychological role of space, and the relationship between identity and environment.

Less received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2019 and completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2016. She earned her BA in Studio Art with a minor in Anthropology from Kenyon College in 2014.

Her recent solo exhibition, Passing Through, was presented at Gross McCleaf Gallery in 2025. Her work has also been exhibited at Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia, Temple University Rome, Freehold Gallery in New Jersey, ARAMARK Headquarters in Philadelphia, and in numerous group exhibitions throughout the region. Her work and writing have been featured in Art Spiel and Art Sync, and she published Following Footprints Forward, an artist book pairing paintings and poetry in 2025.

Alongside her studio practice, Less is a dedicated educator whose teaching emphasizes experimentation, self-discovery, and interdisciplinary thinking. She has taught at Tyler School of Art, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, and currently teaches at Lehigh University and Penn State Abington. Since 2019, she has also worked as a studio assistant to artist Dona Nelson.

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