Jillian Macias is a painter from Elk City, Oklahoma, currently living and working in Norman, Oklahoma. She is completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the University of Oklahoma.

Working primarily in oil paint, Macias creates figurative paintings that explore memory, identity, and interpersonal relationships. Drawing from inherited family photographs, she combines fragments from multiple images to construct scenes that feel familiar yet imagined. Rather than functioning as direct records of the past, these paintings investigate how photographs shape our understanding of moments we did not personally experience.

Her background in psychology informs her interest in perception, memory, and viewer interpretation. Through gesture, body language, color, and spatial relationships, she creates compositions that encourage viewers to form their own understanding of the narratives unfolding within the work. By balancing recognizable imagery with constructed environments, Macias examines how personal and collective histories are continually reshaped through recollection, storytelling, and imagination.

Through painting, she seeks to transform family archives into emotionally layered spaces that explore connection, distance, and the ways memories are preserved, and altered over time.