Bio

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Carol Niotta spent over two decades as a professional artist in the interior design and construction industry — creating murals, fine art reproductions, and custom decorative finishes for clients with multi-million dollar properties, award-winning restaurants, and celebrated wineries. Her work graces the walls of the award-winning Antonello Ristorante in Santa Ana — including the celebrated Levendi Room private dining space — one of Orange County's most prestigious dining destinations. Her projects were featured in Orange Coast Magazine and Ranch & Coast Magazine, with a television interview during a mural project in Sacramento, CA.

Throughout those years, she showed her drawings and paintings sporadically — by invitation — at The dA Center for the Arts in Pomona, CA.

Then came a housing market crisis. A personal trauma. A global pandemic.

It took all three.

During the pandemic, Carol turned inward. She began a series of paintings exploring the depths of her own psyche through what Carl Jung called the Individuation process — using art as a catalyst to make the unconscious conscious. In the tradition of the original Surrealists, who followed Sigmund Freud into the territory of dreams and inner transformation (as documented in André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos), she descended into her own interior world. Without the politics.

What emerged was a profound and utterly unexpected transformation — one she has painstakingly documented, and is now writing about, with the intention of sharing it alongside her art in a self-curated, multi-media exhibition.

To draw a defining line between this work and everything that came before, she paints under the name Bella Disruptor.

Her influences are as layered as her work: René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Judith Leiber, Pete Townshend of The Who. And Mrs. Hershberg — her first-grade teacher — who was the first person to see it. To see her. The girl who combined pictures with stories and couldn't stop. Carol was six years old when she understood, with complete certainty, that this was her destiny.

At eleven, she sat in a movie theater and watched Tommy. The surreal imagery, the symbolism, the raw power of the unconscious mind made visible — it never left her.

And in the final months of her life, the legendary artist and lithographer June Wayne offered Carol her mentorship. That gift — given so close to the end — is the beating heart behind everything Carol is building now. She intends to honor it.