Amela Cikota

Amela Cikota is an abstract artist that works with collages and paintings. When painting, she uses vibrant colors, plays with textures, and experiments with depth. She is currently combining painting with her collages, inspired by nature and the hunt to find nontraditional materials. She is constantly searching for new materials to incorporate in her collages, especially items that have a technology embedded in them, such as player piano paper, computer punched tape and cards, voice recording tape, LED strips, stamps, and architectural floor plans that she created when she was in architecture school. She combines these with more natural papers that have fibers and petals throughout, creating the relationship between nature and technology on one surface, a connection to our daily lives.

Amela was born in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She lived in Germany before immigrating to St. Louis in 1997. She earned her BFA in Art Education with an emphasis in drawing at the University of Missouri - St. Louis in 2017 and currently works full-time as a high school ceramics teacher.