Continuing the Fall 2022 Photography Lecture Series, the MassArt Graduate Programs and the department of Photography are pleased to welcome Melissa Catanese. Please join us in the MassArt Design and Media Center Lecture Hall at 2pm EST on Tuesday, November 29.

Melissa Catanese (b. 1979, Cleveland) combines her images with archival images into a fluid, sensorial experience that pushes the image beyond its nostalgic surface challenging ideas of authorship, representation, consumption, and the life cycle of images. She plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable, and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes, comforts and disturbs. She is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow, Dangerous Women, Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch, and Voyagers. 

Her work has been included in the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography, NoFound Photo Fair in Paris, and at institutions including Light Work, Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Aperture Foundation, MoMA Library and ICP Library in New York. In 2021, Catanese was a remote artist-in-residence at Light Work. She is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant, a BNY Mellon Individual Artist Gift and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014), and to the project Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. 

*All Photography lectures are free and open to the public. Please note that all lectures will take place at 2PM on Tuesdays for the Fall 2022 semester.

Image: Melissa Catanese, Stacked images from the ongoing series The Lottery