Theresa Christensen is a long-time artist, whose works are directly influenced by pop culture, primarily movies and television shows from the 1970’s through today.

A native of Long Island, New York, Theresa received a healthy dose of television and movies as an impressionable youth. She taught herself to draw before she could walk. She later began copying images and illustrations she spotted in Rolling Stone, Archie Comics, and MAD Magazine.

Theresa began painting in the mid 1990’s while attending SUNY New Paltz, as a visual arts major. In her senior year, Theresa applied for a committee grant to found The Student Gallery Committee, a committee that would turn the recently vacated nursing classroom into an art gallery for visual arts majors. The committee was founded in 2000, and upon completion of the gallery she held her senior art show in the space. She and her fellow classmates Danielle DeRoberts and William Rezes showed students how to turn an ordinary space into an art gallery, including how to build structurally sound walls, lighting systems, and hanging systems.

Since then, she has shown her work in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Long Island. Her first professional showing was in September 2001, where she was selected to show a body of work at Madison Square Garden as part of the NYC Independent Film Festival. Theresa also designed the cover of journalist/author Greg Prato’s novel, “MTV Ruled The World: The Early Years of Music Video.” She has also designed craft beer labels for The Brewers Collective and mead labels for WA Meadwerks.

In addition to her pop culture portraits, Theresa has worked professionally as a mural artist. She was one of the artists who worked on the original Gilgo Beach Mural Project in 2006. Perhaps most notably though, she created a series of murals entitled "Guinness: The Journey" for Mary Carroll's Irish Pub in Babylon, NY. This project began in 2018 as one mural and has grown to eight murals in the courtyard of the pub.

In 2024, Theresa partnered with the owner of Mary Carroll's, Conor Hartnett, to open The Christensen Gallery, which resides next door to the pub. The Gallery is the first fine art gallery ever to call Babylon its home.

Theresa currently lives and paints on the south shore of Long Island, where she shares a home with her husband and two children. She is the owner and curator of The Christensen Gallery.

The one question an artist probably gets asked most is, "what kind of art do you make?" At least, that's the question I am asked most, and I tell them that I am a pop culture portrait artist. But really, it's not something that I ever set out to do.

As a child raised on TV in the 80s and stacks of Rolling Stone magazines, some of my most impressionable life experiences have been "filmed in front of a live studio audience." As a young girl, my illustration training was refined by the many hours I spent tediously re-creating the drawings in MAD magazine until they were exactly the same, and then again until I made them my own. I would record shows and movies - on a VCR no less, the only tool of those times - so I could pause my favorite scenes to draw from screen grabs on the television. 

As an artist in my 30s, this love of pop culture began to resurface in my art, often with a series of paintings in a common theme. Many times I would choose a film director and create a body of work that was influenced by that person. Wes Anderson is a huge influence of mine, so naturally my first cohesive series of portraits were based on four of his films. John Hughes' films also left a great impact on me, and my series of paintings based on his work even drew the attention of his muse, Molly Ringwald. I have also done a show based on a hairstyle - the iconic Beehive. Those portraits involved some of my favorite women in pop culture, who all shared that one common hairdo. Other themes in my work include classic TV moms, as well as movie scenes involving breakfast, beer and coffee.

When I create a painting, it is most important to me that I am not only recreating a photo of a person or a scene in a movie, but that in each painting, I really try to bring an emotion out in the subject's eyes. I use color, pattern, and texture to help create an expressiveness, or an extension of that person's character. Even if the viewer is not familiar with a certain character, I want them to understand a little bit about who that person is just by viewing the painting. I use several reference photos and screenshots of each character when I begin planning a painting. I also take photos of myself and my family and combine those with the found photos to create a composition. I collect swatches of fabrics, magazine clippings, food wrappers, clothes, and even objects found in nature to draw inspiration for the colorful backgrounds of my portraits.

My subjects are chosen based on characters that I feel that I can relate to. Those are often people that I consider to be a bit quirky, imperfect, but strong and beautiful in their own way.

I think that the reason that I and so many people out there are so interested in movies and television shows is because they want to look at something that takes them away from reality for an hour or two, something that brings them joy and helps them to escape for a brief time at the end of the day. When people look at my paintings, I want them to have that same feeling. I want them to find an escape, a visual oasis. My hope is that these paintings bring a feeling of nostalgia to the viewer; the comfort they felt when they would turn on the television, and their favorite TV Mom was fixing everyone's problems inside of a 30 minute time slot.  I can't promise to fix life's day to day problems, but I do hope to deliver some eye candy to help people forget about them for a while.