Alexa Meade is an American installation artist best known for her portraits painted directly onto the human body and inanimate objects in a way that collapses depth and makes her models appear two-dimensional when photographed. What remains is "a photo of a painting of a person, and the real person hidden somewhere underneath." She takes a classical concept — trompe l'oeil, the art of making a two-dimensional representational painting look like a real three-dimensional space — and turns it on its head by doing the opposite, making real life appear to be a painting.