Dom is Dom

Dominyka Obelenyte is a Lithuanian-born immigrant, raised in New York and based in Los Angeles. She graduated Columbia University, where she developed a multidisciplinary practice built on experimentation, rule-rejection, and the belief that no single medium can contain her ideas. Dom spent the majority of her life as a professional athlete and stepped away from competition following a serious injury. She is a four time Black Belt World Champion in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

After unceremoniously retiring, she turned to her art practice for what she had always found on the mat: a portal to flow, a mechanism for processing reality, and an engine for transmuting expression from chaos.

The same discipline, focus, and surrender to the present moment that defined her athletic career now lives inside every piece she makes. Dominyka understands life as a play that unfolds in perpetuity: she is the performer, the director and the spectator. Her work lives in the liminality of all three, exploring the whimsy, despair, absurdity and frustration they all feel.

At the heart of her practice is a lifelong attempt to understand what it means to be alive. Her work is rooted in her own ancestry and in a personal belief system built on the virtues of compassion, love, and constant curiosity. She is drawn to co-accidents: artifacts of living that suggest the human experience is inexorably intertwined. Her art is where dreams and reality become forcibly indistinguishable and create a world where living out one’s humanity is a gift to be endlessly explored.