Natalie Pelino is a multi-disciplinary creative, with one eye surveying the mythical past and the other reimagining a more equitable future. Her work tends the fertile landscape of identity and ritual, doubt and belief from an ethnographic perspective.

She earned a MA in Liberal Studies from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington (2020), where she studied philosophy, creative writing, and world religion. Her focus was on women's identity and participation in sacred rituals. She earned an MFA in Writing with a concentration in poetry from Pacific University (2023). At Pacific University, her studies focused on the overlap between the practice of poetry and forms of prayer, with an emphasis on the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Aracelis Girmay. Along with research on the biblical myth of Eve, her primary interest is in the idea of an exiled daughter and a collective mother-mystic, whose expression can be found in the art of poetry.

Natalie's studio experience includes ceramics, black & white photography, oil painting, and ink drawing. She has a particular interest in women's art of the 20th century, such as Helen Frankenthaler's soak-stain paintings and the textiles of Anni Albers. She is intrigued by the artist and audience relationship and how one continually informs the other through creation and interpretation, existing in an ongoing call and response of meaning-making.

Natalie lives on a plateau in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where rhododendrons grow wild, and the black bear occasionally wanders on sidewalks.