Noel Waite (b. 2003) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Denver, Colorado, working primarily in oil painting and printmaking. She earned her BFA in Painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in May 2025.

Waite's work is rooted in the conviction that myth and religion are not separate categories but a single continuous human impulse. The drive to construct narrative frameworks that make the unbearable bearable and the unknown knowable. Her paintings enact this collapse: flesh, foliage, and light dissolving into one another, refusing the boundaries that Western thought has long insisted upon, between body and spirit, nature and divinity, the pre-Christian and the biblical.

Drawing from mythology and folklore, Waite investigates the cultural erasure of pre-Christian cosmologies under the expansion of Christianity, and the enduring influence of biblical allegory on American identity and political life. Through canonical stories, she interrogates the metaphors of male power embedded in narratives presented to children as moral truth, stories in which divine authority is allocated to and exercised by men, legitimized by an unseen force that places it beyond question. Her work connects this inherited mythology directly to the male loneliness epidemic and the rigidity of American gender roles: the same stories that sanctify male dominance teach boys to suppress empathy and perform strength, and girls to defer and absorb, until these conditioned behaviors harden into structures we mistake for nature.

Through symbolic, dreamlike unmoored bodies, Waite constructs spaces where personal mythology and political critique converge, using fantasy not as escape, but as a lens through which the stories we live inside are finally made visible.