Vincent Cianni

Vincent Cianni holds an MFA in Photography from the SUNY New Paltz. He teaches photography at Parsons, the New School for Design and the International Center of Photography.  His work explores community, memory and the human condition through image, text and audio. We Skate Hardcore, an eight-year documentary project of inline skaters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was published by NYU Press and the Center for Documentary Studies in 2004 and was awarded the American Association of University Press Best Book Design.  A major survey of this work was shown at the Museum of the City of New York in 2006 and exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the George Eastman House as well as in London, France and Germany. His work has been widely published including Double Take, Aperture, The New Yorker, Photography as Activism; New York 400: A Visual History of America’s Greatest City (Running Press, 2009); and The Polaroid Book.   Awards include a New York State Council on the Arts Award, the Jerome Foundation Grant,  Santa Fe Vision Award, Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award, Belin Arts Scholarship Award, a Light Work Residency, the New School University Faculty Fund Award and The Palm Center Grant for his work on Gays in the Military. His photographs are represented in numerous public and private collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Akron Art Museum, Museum of the City of New York, and the Biblitheque Nationale de France. Duke University’s Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library established a study archive to insure the preservation of all his documentary projects.  Since November, 2009, Cianni has been interviewing and photographing gay and lesbian veterans and service members recording their experiences of discrimination and recounting the effects the ban on homosexuality had on their careers in the armed forces and their lives afterward. The photographs, transcribed text and audio premiered at Fovea Exhibitions in November 2011 and will be exhibited at the Stephen Daiter Gallery (September 2012) and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, in Houston, TX (2013).