Dani Read is an emerging, Miami-based American fine artist and a career lingerie designer whose work has long explored the architecture of intimacy through structure, tension, softness, and form. For nearly two decades, Read has moved within the corporate design world, leveraging her signature vision to build some of the most innovative and disruptive brands in the industry such as Savage X Fenty, Cosabella, and Kiki de Montparnasse. In recent years Read has quietly turned her artistic focus towards oil painting. What began as a respite from a demanding fashion career has now grown into a passion for recontextualizing her own former creations.
New to the fine art world, but deeply fluent in her craft, Read’s background in lingerie design informs both her subject and sensibility. While she is not classically trained as a painter, Read’s photorealistic still life compositions are intentionally arranged, meticulously rendered, and undeniably erotic. By combining technique in the tradition of the Dutch masters with her perspective as a queer, feminist artist, Read’s work feels both historic and contemporary. As an expert in the business of intimacy, its is clear that Read knows just how to seduce a viewer, while challenging perceptions of femininity, passion, promiscuity, domesticity, queerness, sex work, and sexual trauma.
