Klodiana Alia was born and raised in Tirana, Albania. She came to New York at the age of 16 and got her BA degree in literature with a concentration in English Language Arts from Hunter College in 2008. Following graduation, she began taking pictures as a means of self-exploration, and is entirely self-taught. Klodiana pursued her graduate studies in literature at Hunter College between 2010-2012. In this regard, it is important to note that her photographs combine her literary sensibility with her visual acuity. Her images draw on narrative, poetry, modernist experimental prose, and journalistic reportage. They mediate an encounter between the inner and the outer world, by which her internal experience finds expression in nature. From this encounter emerges a metaphor of a state of being.