Exloring Identities through Art – FESCH.TV

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Globally Connected @ FIT has brought together an exciting panel of three artists who have recently produced work that explores themes of identity, personal history, intimate relationships, and time. Join us for a discussion about their work and how they explore their identities and histories through their lenses.

Annalisa Mazzoli

Originally from Modena, Annalisa studied at ISIA Graphic Institute University of Urbino. She then held a scholarship at the Photography department at FABRICA, Benetton research centre of Communication, and studied at TPW workshop. Since 2003 she has been working as a PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER for magazines and advertising agencies, specializing in Fashion photography, Kids and Woman, Portraits and Still life, working for magazines such as Glamour, VanityFair, Gioia, Amica, DonnaModerna. In 2011 and 2015 she studied and volunteered as a Teaching assistant at ICP INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN NYC, at the same time developing her personal projects. From 2009 to 2016 she taught Photo styling at Afol Moda Milan. Since 2017 she is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), Milan, teaching PHOTO STYLING and fashion communication. From February to September 2020, she attended the FASHION FILM MASTER at the Fashion Research Italy of Bologna. Annalisa is particularly interested in fashion photography, portrait, and personal research.

„La strada di casa“
In February 2020 due to Covid instead of leaving for New York I returned home to my hometown in the countryside. After a month, the last remaining grandmother passed away, at the age of 92, a natural death. During that time I was lucky enough to stay at home with her and say hello. Life was taking me back to my „La strada di casa“ project, (Way home). In these times I have often thought about my grandparents and all the things they left me and taught me. I started this project on my grandparents and on the landscape of my home, in 2003, when I left my village. I missed my land and my family. I felt the need to look at them, I was looking for the gestures, faces and lines that had drawn my map .. I noticed them every time I returned home, they were always the same, familiar to me.. but at the same time a little older. I had to leave to see the lines of that landscape, to appreciate this land characterized by slow rhythms, a strong earth and a sky, which when clear embraces the horizon.

Steven Molina Contreras

Steven Molina Contreras (b.1999, San Salvador, El Salvador) is a lens-based artist living and working in New York. His work focuses on themes of migration, matriarchy, sacrifice, and love by surveying his family’s personal and social history in the United States and El Salvador. Through an approach that employs the aesthetics of documentary and staged photography, Molina Contreras challenges insular views of migrants by expanding their depictions and reclaiming the land and images they portray.

Molina Contreras holds a BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology. His work has been featured by Aperture, Humble Arts Foundation, The New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker to name a few. He was also an artist in residence at Lightwork in 2021.

Ron Amato 

Ron Amato is a Professor in Photography and Related Media at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Ron’s art practice revolves around his identity as a Gay man. Some of the issues explored in Ron’s work are aging within the Gay community, male representation in social media and the attack on LGBTQ people by the previous executive branch of the federal government in the United States. His first monograph, The Box, visually represents Ron’s journey from a boy born into a second-generation Italian-American family in Brooklyn, NY to his current position as a respected educator and artist. Ron is a leader for diversity and inclusion on the FIT campus, serving nine years on The President’s Diversity Council. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. His seminal exhibition of sexual self-portraits in NYC in 2000, established Ron as a leading Queer artist. He has a BFA in Photography from School of Visual Art, NYC and an MFA in New Media Art and Performance from Long Island University. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Seth, and their two Fox Terriers, Ben and Zeb.