All Seeing Seneca

All Seeing Seneca is a New York based illustrator and painter who describes her world as cosmic horror and candyland. She grew up in Shanghai, where limited access to foreign media pushed her toward bootleg animation and fiction and then toward inventing her own characters and stories. She studied at RISD and built a commercial illustration practice alongside personal painting that has shown at fairs including The Armory. In 2021 Yuga Labs brought her in as lead character designer for Bored Ape Yacht Club, and her drawing became the base image for all 10,000 apes. The collection turned into one of the defining objects of the NFT boom, with CoinDesk counting more than a billion dollars of ape trading by late 2021 and Sotheby's later selling a group of apes for around 24 million dollars. Rolling Stone wrote that her creativity helped fuel a technological revolution. Seneca has spent the years since building work under her own name: a debut NFT release at Art Basel Miami in December 2021, a solo series auction with Phillips in 2022 titled Portraiture, gallery painting shows including Albertz Benda in New York, and the 2,880 piece generative series Perils of Sese with Transient Labs in November 2023, which sold out in under ten minutes. She is represented by UTA and has been an outspoken advocate for enforced creator royalties.

Seneca paints and draws surreal figures, usually women and children, with oversized eyes that open into other worlds of flowers, wings, vines and small creatures. The mood sits between storybook sweetness and body horror, in muted, illuminated palettes drawn from animation and cinematic storytelling. She works digitally and in traditional acrylic and spray paint, and in Perils of Sese she combined hand drawn illustration with generative assembly. Her characters are built around eyes and facial expression rather than pose or setting.

• Lead character designer of Bored Ape Yacht Club (2021)
• Perils of Sese, 2,880 piece generative series with Transient Labs on the ERC-7160 standard
• Portraiture, her solo series auction with Phillips in 2022
• Portrait of Invocation, her first physical work sold at auction
• Advocacy for enforced creator royalties in NFT marketplaces
• Represented by UTA; work sold at Sotheby's and Christie's

On the show