I’m Joanna. Iha • Ina Studio began the way most true things do—quietly, privately, before it had a name.

I was a daughter first. Curious, watching, absorbing the particular ways my family moved through the world. The rituals that never got explained because they didn’t need to be. The hands that knew things words couldn’t hold. The stories that lived in the spaces between the telling.

I came to this work through design, through visual merchandising, through years of making things for other people. Building worlds for brands. Learning how to make something feel inevitable before anyone understood why.

Then I became a mother. And in that becoming— that disorienting, luminous threshold —I found the work I needed to make. Not as a concept. As a necessity.

Iha and ina. Daughter and mother in Tagalog. The space between those two words is where everything I make lives.

Iha • Ina Studio exists for every woman who has stood at a threshold and felt the weight of everything behind her. Who felt the little girl in her asking to rest. Who looked at her own mother differently for the first time. Who reached back toward her lola and felt something reach back.

Through Filipino-inspired hand drawn digital illustration and acrylic and mixed media on linen, the studio honours matrescence, ancestry, and the love that moves through women whether they meant to pass it on or not. The digital illustrations carry the intimacy of everyday moments. The canvases hold the weight of what gets passed down.

Each piece is made slowly and with intention—available as original artworks and limited edition prints—not to decorate a wall, but to say ‘I see you’ to someone who needed to hear it.

My art is for daughters who are becoming mothers. For mothers who are still daughters. For the lineages that live in our bodies whether we name them or not.

You already belong here.