Aileen Schretzmayer (b. 2001, Long Island, NY) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice investigates themes of relationships, girlhood, identity, and the abstraction of the body and self. Influenced by contemporary portraiture and narrative photography, she creates visual stories that dwell in the in-between—liminal spaces where memory, emotion, and presence intersect.

Schretzmayer’s recent work centers on female-identifying subjects within spaces of comfort, ritual, and emotional safety. Not portraits in the traditional sense, her photographs trace the quiet moments shared with those closest to her—gestures, glances, and the subtle gravity of time spent together. By abstracting and internalizing the body, she evokes a sense of intimacy that resists definition, allowing the image to become a site of transformation rather than representation.

Her photographs often reimagine familiar environments through close cropping, spatial distortion, and formal experimentation. These compositional strategies create unexpected juxtapositions that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, stillness and transition. In her work, nothing is fixed—what matters is what passes through: light, breath, the unspoken. To witness, for Schretzmayer, is to honor the thresholds where closeness lives and where memory lingers before it fades.