Christine Schiavo, Backyard Series, Fido, 1989/2026, Digital Print, 40 × 40 inches

CHRIS SCHIAVO is a photographer, filmmaker and multi-media artist born and based in New York City. Schiavo is a storyteller and worldbuilder. Her interests in making art lie in work that evokes both personal and commonly experienced events or memories which linger in the subconscious revealing themselves as loose-forms of personal histories and the stories we tell of our collective lives. Schiavo has worked both as a solo artist and in collaboration with dance, opera, sound, written and spoken word, film and live performance. Even when working in solitude, she feels she is always in some form of collaboration with the environment or people or cultures around her. Dreaming of memories, chasing the ghosts. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the SF MOMA, Ca. among other noted public and private collections. She exhibits her film and photography work extensively in galleries, museums and film festivals internationally.

She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts for Architecture and Environmental Spaces, the New York State Council of the Arts / Film, the English Council of the Arts/ Film and Environmental Installation, BCAT Multi-Media Award and most recently in 2022 was awarded a creative artists fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Artists Residencies include Macdowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Saltonstall, Milay, VCCA, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Braziers and the Marie Walsh-Sharpe Studio Program, NYC. She has a BFA in visual art and Film from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Empire State College of NY. Schiavo premiered the first two chapters of a black and white, silent film titled “Rivet Girl; A constant coming of age story”, told in 12 interchangeable chapters at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. The film, a silent, black and white piece, uses super-eight, analog and digital film, drawing, photography and original music, to tell the coming-of-age story of a female protagonist in search of identity and unique sense-of-self within a subconscious, alternate reality. Schiavo is currently working on a three part film, photography and limited edition monograph titled “ Chasing Ghosts. NYC “. This multiple media work, produced over a decade of riding the NYC transit systems, uses a variety of Cellphone cameras and altered recording devices capturing an infinite loop of surreal and abstracted images of the brief glimpses and fractured narratives of ‘ familiar strangers ‘ encountered over a decades worth of daily commutes.