Dina is a sculptor and printmaker, and began teaching with UMaine's Hutchinson Center in 2004. She runs the Post Office Studio Workshop in Belfast, Maine and holds a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic, an MA in Arts and Art Education from Columbia University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. About her work as an artist and teacher, Rhode Island poet Rick Benjamin writes, "Dina creates new pedagogies, new processes and forms that suit and accommodate her impulses and predilections as an artist-thinker. She consistently puts her hands in the earth-- in the muck and the mire of animals, plants, minerals-- in order to develop practices that are fully in touch and alive with the rest of the sentient world." 

Running at Brooklyn College in 2008 and 2009, and in 2011 with Peter Hocking at Goddard College, her ongoing arts and ecology project "Human Tracks: Artful Dialogs with Place" explores a multiplicity of art forms for illuminating the biological and cultural edges shared by the human and non-human world. Dina has received Vermont Studio Center and Rockefeller scholarships. She sits on the board of Waldo Arts Mission and shows regularly in the mid-coast region. Creatura Botanica II: Human and Plant Forms Conjoined, a show of prints, encaustic mixed media, luminaires and sculptures will open in Emilia-Romagna Italy in April 2012 thru October and will run in conjunction with the week-long print intensive Plein Air & Mixed Media Printmaking in Rural Italy: Exploring Monotype amidst the Garden Splendor of Galeazza.  New Foundland artist Pam Hall writes "As a wildly ambitious and experimental print-maker and sculptor, Dina's visual art walks the knife-edge between delicate and muscled - between full-bodied materiality and quiet conceptualism." Dina Petrillo lives in Thorndike, Maine with her husband, three dogs and two goats.