Salvita De Corte

Like the characters she portrays and the canvases she paints, Bali-based actress and visual artist Salvita De Corte, 31, can’t be defined by a singular role or solitary stroke. Raised by a German mother (a jewelry designer) and an Indian-Sulawesi father (the late Balinese painter Salim Fakhruddin)

This mixed-heritage model—a former Elle and Harper’s Bazaar cover girl—has put her creative pedigree to good use, with plum roles in the HBO series Halfworlds, the sci-fi anthology Portals of Blair Witch Project director Timo Tjahjanto, and as a reluctant but ravishing star of the Indonesian silver screen.

Once a little girl in Legian beach, where she lived under the long shadow of her talented parents, Salvita’s rich artistic inheritance is most apparent in her abstract portraits, where she channels her emotions (“very rarely is it a calm sea,” she says) into every color, line, and brushstroke. As she shuffles between film sets in Jakarta and her father’s old studio by the Java sea, Salvita defies time by relying on a wardrobe of reinvented basics that reflect her body of work: effortlessly cool, comfortable on the eyes, and conversation pieces.