Regina Ruff is a visual artist based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Originally from Florida, she earned her B.F.A. from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and her M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the State University of New York at New Paltz.Regina Ruff is a visual artist based in Jersey City, New Jersey. She earned her B.F.A. in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) in 2005 and her M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2012. Her academic background informs a rigorous studio practice grounded in material exploration, expressive abstraction, and spatial experimentation.
She has been an artist in residence at the Spruce Art Residency in Indiana, Pennsylvania. She participated in a panel discussion How We Live, with moderator Jill Conner at the Culture District Gallery, NYC. Her work has been featured in: Allen and Houston Magazine, Jersey City Independent, and The Journal of Modern Craft online. Ruff has taught studio art at SUNY New Paltz and the Fashion Institute of Technology. In addition to her studio practice, she is the Studio Manager at Jono Pandolfi Designs, and her personal studio is located at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.
Her work has been exhibited nationally at institutions and galleries including the United Nations (New York, NY), The NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space (NYC), Columbia City Gallery (Seattle, WA), the Samuel Dorsky Museum (New Paltz, NY), and Bahamas Biennale Gallery (Mukwonago, WI), among others. She has also exhibited at P.S.122 Gallery, M55 Art, World Culture Open Gallery, and The Museum at FIT.
Ruff’s abstract paintings, drawings, and installations investigate themes of self-discovery, psychological tension, and the multiverse. Rooted in expressive mark-making and layered spatial compositions, her work explores parallels between internal emotional landscapes and the natural world. Using bold color and mixed media, she creates fluid, intuitive forms that mirror nature’s rhythms—its eruptions, stillness, and unpredictability—as metaphors for psychological experience. Her work functions as an emotional ecology: layered, evolving, and unresolved, inviting curiosity, introspection, and embodied engagement rather than fixed narratives.
In The Expanded Series, Ruff extends gestures beyond the canvas into surrounding walls and floors, transforming painting into an immersive spatial experience. These installations activate space as a fragmented yet interconnected field of color, texture, and movement, blurring boundaries between artwork and environment. By engaging the space around the painting, Ruff seeks to dissolve distinctions between the visible and the felt, the constructed and the intuitive, creating an evolving dialogue between form, space, and perception that shifts as viewers move within it.