A sculptor, printmaker, and designer, Dina has been exhibiting and teaching in the Mid Coast since she moved to Maine from New York City in 2000. She's been teaching sculpture and printmaking with the University of Maine's Hutchinson Center since 2004 and in 2005 she opened the Post Office Studio Workshop in downtown Belfast. A production print studio, the PO workshop became the home of Belfast Bay Shade Company in 2012, and in January 2013 , Dina and her husband Ryan launched a new line of hand-printed botanical lampshades in New York City. 


Dina 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 Laureate 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.” 


Creatura Botanica II: Human and Plant Forms Conjoined, a show of prints, encaustic, luminaires and sculptures opened in Emilia-Romagna Italy in April 2012 and hung until Castello di Galeazza collapsed in the May 2012 earthquakes that shook the Bologna region. Five pieces from Creatura just recently opened at Casa Del Mantegna in Mantova with works by German photographer Sven Fennema, and Greek and Ukrainian painters Pavlos Habidis and Juri Zurkan. A fellow College of the Atlantic alum, director of Corte Eremo and curator of Creatura, Clark Lawrence writes "….she (Dina) is fascinated by many tiny details in life that other people don't even notice - from the delicate patterns of tree trunks chewed by goats to the tiny ridges on leaves. Petrillo mainly uses what is around her, beginning by freely garnering materials, ideas, and images; then she begins to confidently combine and layer them into compositions of bees wax and papers, photographs, ink, paints, and plant material from her surroundings.” 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.”


“Human Tracks: Artful Dialogs with Place”, an ongoing arts and ecology project, ran at Brooklyn College in 2008 and 2009, and in 2011 with Peter Hocking at Goddard College. Working in situ at urban, rural, suburban and industrial sites, Human Tracks enlists art forms (materials-based and performative) for investigating the biological and cultural edges shared by humans and their non-human world. Dina has received Vermont Studio Center and Rockefeller scholarships and serves on the board of Waldo Arts Mission. She lives in Thorndike, Maine with her husband, three dogs and two goats.