Melissa Catanese

Melissa Catanese lives and works in Pittsburgh. She is the author of Voyagers (2018), Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch (2015), Dangerous Women (2013), and Dive Dark Dream Slow (2012). Her work often combines her images with found and anonymous photographs. She plays with these 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. A solo exhibition of her most recent series, The Lottery, will be on view at Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery at Light Work in spring 2022.

She has been included in the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography, NoFound Photo Fair in Paris, and at institutions including 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 also 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. Her most recent teaching appointments include University of Pittsburgh, Image Text Ithaca MFA, Hartford Art School Photography MFA, and International Center for Photography.