Carolina Cortella

Carolina Cortella is an Argentine-American artist and creative based in Mill Valley, California. She began her career in film directing, with photography becoming a complementary part of her visual practice —an immersive foundation that refined her eye for narrative, visual composition, and creative collaboration. Rooted in slow craft, each of her ceramic works is shaped by intuition and guided by the material. Inspired by the textures of nature, architecture, art history, and the clay itself, her work often quietly merges art and function—designed to elevate everyday rituals. Driven to create a sensory impact, her hand-built, organic pieces are intended to react in their environment through light and space.

 

After completing her BFA in Film Direction from Fundacion Universidad del Cine and a career in filmmaking, Cortella felt the urge to experiment with tangible materials, as a way to continue her storytelling. She brings a cinematic sensibility to her practice, exploring the interplay of light, space, and form. Her works also often subtly reference the visuals of films that have inspired her. Her photography practice now runs alongside her ceramics, shaping her sense of composition, surface, and mood, translating images into form and using both mediums to tell tactile, visually-driven stories.

 

Originally from Buenos Aires, Cortella continued her creative career in Los Angeles for over a decade. Her work has been featured in Artforum and exhibited in Los Angeles, Paris, and Buenos Aires. Today, Cortella works from her studio in the hills of Mill Valley, hand-building contemporary ceramics that embrace imperfection, simplicity, and the quiet clarity of wabi-sabi philosophy.