Madi Imperio (b. 2000, Maryland) is an American artist based in Michigan working across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Their practice sits between self-reckoning and world-building, a place where personal history, public perception, and imagined futures converge, often without resolution. The studio becomes a working laboratory, discovering what forms become possible when multiplicity exists without being forced into clarity.

At the center of Imperio’s work is a figure that slips between different physical states and refuses a single, stable form. This figure, the Malleable Being, emerged as a way to hold multiple truths experienced within the body and the structures they move through. Every mark, drip, and sag becomes a record of touch, embracing instability as a condition of being instead of weakness. Like the materials used throughout the work, (foam clay, canvas, charcoal, and paint) the figure adjusts, blends, stands out, and reforms. Malleability becomes a state of navigating being read, misread, and shaped by perception without becoming fixed by it.

Raised in Florida, Imperio draws from lived experience navigating personhood in the American South. Their practice explores multiracial identity, belonging, and adaptability through these gooey, malleable figures that shift between vulnerability and resilience, visibility and obscurity. Imperio earned an MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.