Valentina Dragotta (Valepainthings) is a professional dancer and a self-taught painter born in the summer of 1992 in a small town in northern Italy, to a Piedmontese mother and a Sicilian father. She grew up in Italy, where she lived until the age of 23. After completing a degree in Economics and Management, she chose to leave that path shortly after graduation to pursue her true calling: dance.
 
Hip hop and house dance became the core of her artistic and personal research. In 2016, she moved to Paris, where she quickly joined ParadoxSal Crew, a leading name on the international dance scene. Over time, the crew evolved into a fully established company, with which Valentina still works today, performing on prestigious stages and traveling worldwide.
 
Before this path could fully unfold, a decisive event occurred. Three years after her arrival in Paris, just as she decided to leave her job as a shop assistant to dedicate herself entirely to her professional dance career, she suffered a rupture of the posterior cruciate ligament in her right knee during a residence showing.
 
It was during this period of forced physical limitation that her spontaneous and necessary encounter with visual arts took place. Deprived of bodily expression through movement, Valentina found in painting a new space for release. She began with paper and colored pencils, moved on to canvas paper and then stretched canvas, also experimenting with oil paints, later choosing acrylics as her preferred medium. Her approach is entirely self-taught.
 
The need was to give form to what remained trapped in the body: dense, layered emotions that could not be released through dance at that time. Painting thus became an extension of movement, another language of the body.
 
On September 18, 2020, she exhibited some of her works for the first time in a bar in the Pigalle district of Paris: paintings on canvas paper created with acrylic and oil.
On May 20 and 21, 2025, she presented larger and more mature works during the opening of the dance festival Inside Art at the Serre Wangari in Saint-Ouen. The exhibition, titled Ex-peau, explores the concept of skin as a metaphor for change—layers that transform as a result of inner shifts, often unconscious, difficult, and painful.
 
Her artistic direction is now clearly defined: to bring to light the emotions that pass through us and invite viewers to face them without judgment. Her work encourages reflection on human sensitivity and fragility, too often perceived as a weakness, despite being an essential part of our lives. It reclaims the right to be sensitive and vulnerable, and sometimes to take one’s pain less seriously, exorcising those inner demons that, when honestly acknowledged, prove to be universal.
 
In June 2025, she takes part, alongside three other artists, in a collective exhibition at the Maison de la Conversation in Saint-Ouen, entitled À corps ouvert(e). The common thread uniting the four artists is their relationship with the female figure, bodies, and everyday gestures transformed into symbolic rituals.