Breana Mazzagatte was born in California in 1990, and raised in La Puente, a city in East Los Angeles County. Her portraiture often carries a theme of grief and tension, drawing from her own life experience. Breana was adopted at the age of five and lost both of her parents in 2018, an experience she detailed in a podcast produced by Campfire Media, called “My Dead Parents”.
In 2022, Mazzagatte showed her series, “Bleed For Me”, in a pop-up gallery in the arts district of downtown LA, which displayed large scale printed portraits of nosebleeds. “Beed For Me” features artists like Steve Agee, Louise Bartle of Bloc Party, and pro-skater Braydon Zsofranski, where Mazzagatte uses theatrics to communicate the way that the humanness of blood counter balances strong and stoic qualities as well as soft and gentle ones. The series was featured in Monster Children Magazine’s 2022 Annual.
Since 2022, Mazzagatte was a featured photographer in Leica Camera’s SL3 campaign and has been published by magazines like Coveteur, Arlette, and Insomnia. In 2025 she was a finalist for the Women’s Street Photography New York Exhibition, shown at Artspace PS109.
Her latest ongoing series, “Once More, Without Feeling” explores the marks left behind by the mask we all wear, featuring performers removing their costumes, make up, and props, to reveal the imprints on their skin and tenderness in their expression.
