Contact
daria@polichetti.art
310•741•7598
Biography
I’m a writer, illustrator, and VFX artist/producer. I’ve worked for 12+ yeas on films here in Los Angeles, where my husband is also a film editor.
I’m the daughter of a retired US diplomat. I grew up living and traveling in Afghanistan, where I was born, Thailand, Africa, India & Hawaii. I attended Rhode Island School of Design for my BFA & The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for my MFA, then moved to Los Angeles in '04.
For more about me, please feel free to take a look at dariapolichetti.com, where you’ll find information on other book and film projects in various stages of development. Including another illustrated novel, Walby & Sticks, which I sometimes describe as: The story they’d’ve come up with if Mad Max, Stephen Hawking and Harry Potter had all gotten together to write a middle grade adventure.
Logline
In 1922, a suffragette, a killer, a thief who doesn’t speak & a self-proclaimed fallen angel struggle to escape the iron jaws of a 1920s insane asylum. But if the angel’s just a troubled girl, clinging to a fantasy, then following her escape plan could be fatal to them all.
In 2006, three students from Rhode Island School of Design, and one from Brown, follow a ghostly apparition to the long-abandoned asylum and unravel their impossible connection to a killing that took place there 80 years before.
Now, as history begins to repeat, so will the death and devastation — unless they can break the circle, and finally right the wrongs of the past.
Pitch
LOOKING FOR ALASKA meets ALIAS GRACE with a DEAD AGAIN twist, and illustrated vignettes that feel like snippets from LORE. For fans of speculative YA like The Raven Boys, We Were Liars, Bone Gap, The Hazel Wood, and Jennifer Donnelley’s Revolution.
In 2006, after the disturbing, unexpected death of her mother, 18yo Clemency Rivers is about to be expelled from Rhode Island School of Design when a ghostly apparition steps from her dreams and leads her and her two best friends—along with her two worst enemies — to the long-abandoned asylum where her grandmother was locked up in 1922.
After breaking in late one night, a trove of old sketches and documents, along with parts of her grandmother’s journal, reveal the ill-fated love story of the two main characters: a self-proclaimed fallen angel trying to earn redemption by helping the misfits on her ward escape; and an idealistic psychiatry student from Yale who thinks he can heal her broken mind.
A group of young suffragettes the world has written off as “mad,” a world-renown doctor with old-school “therapies,” a serial killer on the loose, and a former Harlem Hellfighter round out the historical cast in a plot that culminates in the horrible murder of one of the girls on the ward.
Decades later, Clemency struggles with escalating visions of the ghostly apparition, while her friends each face their own challenge: a missing father who’s a member of the nearby Narragansett tribe, a mother caught in an abusive relationship, and the death of a brother who fought in Desert Storm. But as more connections form between the two casts of characters, Lemon discovers that she and her friends are part of the tragic history in ways no one could have imagined.
Clemency struggles with her art and her past, but still ends up on the brink of expulsion as her tenuous grip on reality begins to unravel. She’s no longer sure if the ghostly apparition is a side-effect of drugs she was prescribed after her mother’s death — or if, just maybe, the injustice of her grandmother’s story created a group of lost souls who’ve finally found their way back to one another in a new life.
She desperately needs to believe that fate is offering her a second chance at love and redemption, but as history begins to repeat, so will the death and devastation — unless she can break the circle, and finally right the wrongs that happened so many years before.
Blurb
This is a fiercely unique, vividly imagined story. The writing is absolutely, indisputably stunning and the storylines conjured here are beautiful and devastating and horrifying all at once. It’s a timely novel—a poignant, feminist novel that isn’t afraid to hold a mirror up to the way women have been cast aside, put in boxes (literally and figuratively) throughout history. The subject matter is alluring, but the execution is downright intoxicating. A heady blend of eerie, fantastical, dark, and ambiguous.
- Kate Angelella
Former editor at Simon & Schuster
Overview
HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE, so they say…
In honor of the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage, No Color but the Light is an illustrated YA speculative thriller combined with an historical narrative steeped in fantastical realism.
Set in the Northampton Insane Asylum (a real place torn down in 2006), this story examines the chilling impact of a corrupt patriarchy on the wellbeing of women and asks the evermore timely question: Who, as a society, do we choose to believe? And whose truths, historically, have been marginalized or ignored? It flips the traditional hero’s journey by showing the path from extraordinary to ordinary in a positive light. And it creates a fantastical atmosphere to show how believing in something greater — even if it’s a crazy fantasy — can offer hope and joy in the darkest of worlds.
This story is about a wild, unexpected girl running toward a calamitous end, who desperately needs to believe in something magical and divine. And a boy who comes to understand that reality and truth can be two very different things. It’s about ill-fated love finding a second chance, the mysteries of a wounded mind, and all the ways that art can heal, from Kandinsky’s chaos to Dalí’s dreams.
This site contains a sample of illustrations from this project as well as a short video that offers a sense of the historical timeline’s aesthetic and tone. The images are rough comps, placeholders, and works in progress based on the text: proof of concept, but not final art. There to provide an idea of what the final work will look like, and how it will function in the story. The original sketches and art, the fictional documents, and the real, historical photographs (all old enough to be in the public domain) are intended to be produced physically rather than just digitally, aged where needed, laid out as if on set, and shot in a rich, cinematic manner.